


These Wild Fires

by juniper__tree



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Christianity, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Forgiveness, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Impotence, Murder, Remorse, Revenge, Sexual Dysfunction, Unconditional Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-17
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2020-12-20 21:43:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 18
Words: 76,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21063656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juniper__tree/pseuds/juniper__tree
Summary: What's it gonna take to make her walk away from Zion?





	1. Chapter 1

_—Now—_

The moon was new, but the stars made up for it.

On a flat ridge in the middle of Zion Valley, Eddy sat back on her elbows in the red dust and stared into the glittering sky.

It was a vertical middle. Not so low the soft rush of the Virgin sang her to sleep. Not so high the wind whistled hard and urgent between gnarled juniper branches. Only the snores of a few Dead Horses on their pallets split the silence. Let her know she wasn't alone.

Never imagined it could get so quiet here. There were spots out in the Mojave where, if a dust devil didn't spin up and spit dirt at you, you wouldn't hear or see anything move for miles and miles. When you did, it was a radscorpion. And then what you heard was your own gunfire.

No natural human noise. No sweet river or soft cottonwoods. Even the yuccas didn't budge.

Zion, though. If you climbed up high and swept your eyes around the whole canyon, it looked every bit as empty. But it wasn't. Bighorners and yao guai, dragonflies and fish, cattails and rushes. The whole damned valley seemed to sing with wind and water.

There were green plants here, flowers and bushes—pretty ones, deadly ones, but _green_ and everywhere.

And the Sorrows didn't stay hidden in their caves anymore. Not for a time. Now that the White Legs were gone—dead, mostly, though that Salt-Upon-Wounds and his men made it out alive—the people of the tribe weren't afraid. They knew the valley better than anyone else, and it was theirs to roam.

Well. Joshua Graham said the valley belonged to God. That awestruck, whispery way he described God, and all his works and meanings, Eddy could almost believe what he did. Zion was that beautiful.

She'd leave it soon. The fight was long over now. They didn't need anything else from her. She could wind her way back to the passage where she entered the valley, back to the long road, alone. Back to Vegas, and her friends, and her enemies. Back to where the Legion held forth on their hill, above the world. Unfinished business. It needed finishing.

She sighed, and stretched her head to the side, her shoulders crooked tight. Truth was, she could have left weeks ago. Follows-Chalk had already gone, headed to Vegas or even the Hub, making his own way without any map but the one in his head.

She'd packed her satchel and got ready to walk, more than once. Something pulled her back, every damn time—one of the Sorrows women asked for her help with an unruly bighorner calf, or Daniel needed her Pip-Boy to check one of his hand-drawn maps.

Or she went to fill her canteen, and Joshua was there, reading by the water. Sat back against a boulder of sandstone, boots stretched out in the dust. And his sharp blue eyes followed her every move, she could feel it. Then she was afraid. Of what, she wasn't sure.

Something wouldn't let her walk away yet.

Guess it was worth staying a while longer for a night like this.

The thin air was warm on the ridge and Eddy, in a dirty buttoned shirt and tied-tight corduroys she picked up from a Ranger station, she was comfortable enough to leave her Followers coat, and her hat, back in Angel Cave. Where she stashed all her things. Even the Pip-Boy.

The little silver 9mm was stuffed into the back of her pants. She'd never leave that fucking pistol behind, no matter what. That was the gun that shot her dead. She never let it out of her reach.

The lady on the grip prayed while she stomped all over the moon, and the boy. She was a menace.

It could get cold in the valley, colder higher up in the wind, but this night? It was nice. Like a warm spring. The Happy Trails caravan found one of those on the way in, and they'd all dipped into the water there, laughing and sharing whiskey. That was right before they hit Zion. Right before they all died. The spring was off the Long 15. _Pah Tempe,_ the signs said._ Hurricane._ Joshua told her they were old words, from old languages.

Eddy stretched out her own legs and kicked up a swirl of red. Everyone else was asleep. The Dead Horses were tucked away in the caves, but some liked the open air, and spread out along the ridge on their horner hide and sweet grass beds.

Torches lined the paths along the hillside, pointed out the shaky rope bridges that crossed the gaps, but they were dots of light in the dark valley. The red cliffs glowed purple at night.

There were no clouds. The stars were bright enough to see by, and damn but there were millions of them. A big, messy stripe of them, a blur. She could see why they'd called it "milky," in the moldy science books the Followers collected. Looked more fuzzy, to her. Dirty white fur. A cat, maybe. In space.

Maybe the blurry stripe was the cat's tail. The old books showed other shapes for the stars, and she'd memorized a few: the bear, the bull, the scorpion.

The white cat could swallow them all.

What would Joshua make of this clear, star-filled sky, were he around? _The heavens are God's glory. They show us the magnificent reach of His hand._ Something pretty like that. His voice was in her head. Been stuck there for months now. She could have a conversation with him when he wasn't even nearby.

That scared her. Maybe less than it should have.

There was a faint, faraway flash in the corner of her sight. She turned to the patch of sky where she thought it had been, but it was nothing. Only the same stars, and they didn't move.

Until one did. There. It fell through the sky—or shot, like a bullet. A streak of light, and it was gone.

Now if there were two, she guessed, there might be more. She slid off her glasses and wiped them on the tail end of her shirt. They were dusty, and greasy, and the shirt didn't help much. But she could see all the points of light sharper with them on. Without, they were a smudge, like that cat's tail.

As soon as she had them back on her nose, there was another star, shooting down the sky. Then another, to the left, over the sharp point she'd never seen past that edged the valley.

She laughed to herself. It was so strange, these falling stars. She'd never seen anything like it. But there was no sharp little voice voice in the back of her mind that said_ Worry. This ain't right._ It did feel right. There was nothing to worry over anymore.

Her gut was tense from a year or two of racing around the Mojave with so much to lose. It was hard to listen to it sometimes. Easier, out here, where she was nothing but a bag of bones between earth and sky.

Arcade would have liked to see these stars. She'd wanted to bring him here. She'd come to depend on him, for his brains and his heart, which she loved with all of hers. But there was value in being alone for a while, he said. _And Wisdom's self oft seeks to sweet retired solitude._

He pulled that from some book he'd stashed away. She learned a long time ago he never said anything original.

Maybe, what with everything that happened, and the people she found here, it was best he didn't come. The rest of them, too. She didn't think anybody else would understand why she stayed here. Why she let Joshua Graham walk around breathing air, instead of putting him down in the dirt.

Maybe Arcade's dusty old saying was true, in a way. Another star flickered and sank into the night.

Taking the Happy Trails job on her own had been an escape from all that loss in the desert. An exile. Nobody on the Long 15 knew who Eddy was, or the crazy fame she'd acquired, despite all best efforts. No one cared about her, or asked her for anything but to read a map and shoot a gun.

She'd done that a lot, before all the bullshit. Never out this way, or this far.

Zion was supposed to be a vacation. Still was, in the ways that mattered. Even with the war, the assaults, keeping the tribes safe, and... everything else. There was something here that soothed her. Something that made the endless blood and scratching for power and caps dissolve into background static, like a broken radio.

It let the pain in her head fade. It let the wide canyon hold her quiet and still. It let her sleep.

But sometimes it was too beautiful to let it pass by without watching. "Like tonight," she said to herself.

"You're awake."

A deep, hoarse voice, dark and warm as the night around her, spoke out. Joshua.

She sat up and brushed the dust from her elbows as he came close. His snakeskin boots stepped soft over the red soil.

_You're awake._ It was the first thing he ever said to her, after she came to in Angel Cave on that rotten, rickety cot. She'd passed out at the mouth of the cave, in that boy's arms, from the blood loss and the pain. Joshua saw to her wounds while she slept.

He made her nervous then. That fact had not changed in the months since. Maybe the degree of it had, or the reason for it.

He stood next to her. "Watching the skies?" he asked, and folded his hard arms tight over all the zippers and pockets of his flak jacket. "Good night for it. But they usually are, here."

Eddy gave a soft grunt. "There's something strange going on."

"Oh?" He was interested, or he was sarcastic, or he was patronizing. Hell, she couldn't figure him out. She could swear he made inflections no one else did, or could, and all at once half the time.

"Just watch for a piece. Maybe you'll see. The stars are falling." She pointed up at the sky, but there wasn't one direction they'd fallen from, or to.

He hummed, curious, and shuffled his feet. Pebbles rolled away under his boot.

She hugged her knees close and kept her eyes on the sky. It was a better thing to focus on, instead of his closeness, and his unknowableness, and how white the bandages were against the burned red of his skin in the pale starlight.

So focus she did. She narrowed her eyes and scanned the stars, waiting for another to fall, until her eyes were sore from not blinking. Joshua was silent beside her. It seemed like a long while.

Then a little flash. A short one, it fizzled into nothing almost before she saw it.

"There!" she said, pointing to the dark spot where the star had been. "See that?"

"Yes, I did." He let his arms fall, and his hand brushed her shoulder. That took her focus from the stars. She stared at his bandage-wrapped hand, and the raw, scarred fingertips he left uncovered. They trembled near her arm, thick and trigger-bent. Less hard than they looked.

"And there's another," he said. Quickly, she turned her gaze back to the sky, but of course it was already gone.

"Ever seen that before?" She looked up at him from the ground.

"Yes. Long ago," he answered, and met her eyes. Even in the starlit dark, his own were as clear and blue as the water that rushed the rocks at the Narrows gate. "But not like this. It's... beautiful." His voice was softer then. Soft, when he spoke to her, and looked at her.

Eddy sat up straight and stared out into the canyon. She didn't want him speaking soft to her, under the stars, all alone. Like they were kids, or idiots. Even if she liked it. She knew what she was—a woman too far gone and too hard for any other life. And him? Well, just look at him.

Joshua stepped away then, like he'd heard her thinking about him. That wouldn't shock her, if he knew all her own thoughts close as she did. He made his way up the ridge toward a cliffside path. Maybe, she thought, he was embarrassed from acting that way. 

But he stopped at the bottom of the upward slope and turned back to her. "Come this way," he said. _Ordered._ He wasn't soft anymore.

Eddy set her jaw hard and didn't move She didn't take kindly to orders. "No. I'm watching the—"

"I know a better vantage point. Trust me."

She sighed, and pushed herself off the ground. If he said it was so, it probably was so. Anyhow, if there was a more peaceful and open spot in the canyon to watch the stars fall from the sky than here, she wanted to see it.

She'd learned to trust him by now. In the beginning, there was no other choice. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading. This is a story that's been on my mind for years and still keeps burning... if you'll pardon the terminology.


	2. Chapter 2

_—Four months ago—_

When Eddy woke, she remembered being shot.

She remembered the searing white flash of pain that charged through her like a sharp clap of thunder. The blur of her sight, and the drift of her mind into the silent, empty black.

She remembered being killed each day she woke up alive.

Every time, she half-expected to find herself back in Doc Mitchell's house. She could still smell it: vodka and lamp oil and Blamco mac and cheese. The doc was kind but shaky, a sad old man that made her sad to look at him. Eddy didn't like being sad when she didn't have to.

But she always woke somewhere else, since that day. Some bed at the Wrangler, crusty with fluids she didn't want to think about. Curled up back to back with Arcade on a worn-out sleeping bag next to a creosote bush, both their glasses somehow caught in the low, sticky branches.

This time, she woke sore, and alone, in a rotten cot. Wherever she was, it smelled like mold and gunpowder.

This time, she remembered being shot with the Happy Trails folk. They all went down, Jed and Stella, that fool Ricky. And so did she. One of the raiders hit her good, in the upper thigh. She'd lost more blood than she could handle, trying to fend off the ambush and walk away. Stupid.

She was the one who made it out. Real good end to the trip.

Fuzzy, faint lights blurred somewhere past the close dark. The air was thin and cool, and a fire flickered somewhere. She couldn't see. The cot beneath her squeaked and rattled while she felt blindly for her glasses, her Pip-Boy, anything.

There was nothing but cold, flat rock beneath her.

Someone was speaking nearby, low and deep. Asking for something—pleading, but it sounded so strange. One sad tone, like a bad song.

She felt a chill, like her legs were bare, and tossed off the thin cover. Her legs were propped up on a stack of blankets. She had on nothing below her shirt but loose, grimy underwear, and a heavy wrap of bloody bandages around her thigh.

Her pants were gone. Her gear was gone.

She tried to swing her leg out of the cot, and—_fuck_. Pain fired into her leg and shot right through, throbbing in her veins. She let out an awful groan. 

"You're awake." The low voice spoke to her. Its owner came closer. He—she guessed—scraped a chair across the rock floor and set it near where she lay, holding her leg and cursing quietly.

He sat down in the chair and turned the knob on a camp lantern. The corner brightened. Without her glasses most everything was a blur, but even so— He was featureless, white. Didn't know if he was human.

Whatever he was, he could talk. He could answer her.

"Where's my pack?"

The man leaned forward, and dragged something lumpy and heavy across the rock. It clanked at one of the cot's feet. "Here." Then he sat back, calm and quiet.

It unnerved her, how he didn't move. It felt like a trap. She kept her bad eyes on him while she reached below.

Her glasses were there, on top of a neatly folded pair of pants. Glasses on, she found her bulging, frayed canvas pack beneath. The Pip-Boy was inside, under the zipper. Her stash of caps. Her carbine in the blanket case. The little silver 9mm.

Eddy could see clearly now, in the dim light. They were in a cave, on a cold, wet rock face table, the cot shoved against the far back wall. No way out but forward. She was cornered.

Torches lined the cave walls, their flames burning steady.

The man was still, sitting easy in the old chair, hands in his lap. He was human, or a ghoul, though she didn't see much distinction between the two most times. Wrapped all over in dingy bandages, under his clothes, and around his face, his mouth. Covered everywhere, but his eyes.

The skin around them was rough, scarred and patchy, and the whites of his eyes were an angry red mass of veins. But the eyes were blue, clear glass blue. They fixed her with a look that was haunted, that couldn't hide anger and pain no matter how he tried.

She knew that look well. She saw it in every mirror.

"Where am I?" she asked.

"In a cave, in Zion Canyon. Follows-Chalk brought you here," he said, nodding his head back toward the black expanse that must have led out of the cave. "Do you remember?"

The tribe boy, or probably more than a boy, he'd said a lot of things she couldn't hear, past the pain and the gunshot ring in her ears. He had her lean on him, and walked her, wincing and bleeding into the dirt, up and then down past trees and cliffs. There was water, where he stopped, and people. Then she blacked out.

"The White Legs welcomed you before we could. My apologies." That must have been what passed for a joke, from him, but he didn't sound amused. "You were hit in a large vein in your leg. Lost a lot of blood. It could have been very unfortunate, if Follows-Chalk had not found you in time."

Wasn't the first time she'd come that close. Sure it wouldn't be the last. It explained all the big drumbeat throbbing on both sides of her head. The thirst.

And the fact that she didn't feel like answering any of his questions. Only wanted to ask her own.

Eddy thought he might not be a ghoul. It was rude, maybe, to ask, if he was trying to hide it with those bandages. His voice wasn't so hoarse, but it was deep, and harsh. There was hurt and rage in it. Most ghouls she knew were apathetic. They'd seen it all, for longer than they wanted to, and couldn't get so mad anymore. They'd grown tired of it.

"Who are you?"

He stared at her. His hands were flat on his thighs, unmoving, though she saw an uncomfortable twitch in his bent trigger finger.

Finally, he said, "My name is Joshua Graham."

Eddy's heart beat hard into her throat. It couldn't be so. Joshua Graham was dead. Joshua Graham was a ghost story, for young Legionaries and New Californians alike.

Must be some psycho, she told herself, some sad sack who took on the name, so people would be afraid of him.

But something knocked against the back of her mind, and said, _It is so._ Hanlon, he'd told her Graham was from Utah. He'd told her Graham spoke to the tribes, way back when.

The skin around his eyes, shiny and raw and ragged—those were burn scars. Like the skin on his fingertips, the dark, wounded fingers that curled over his jeans.

And she was cornered. Backed against the wall, behind him.

She let her hand drift down below the cot, close to her pack. The carbine was in its case, that wouldn't work. It would take a few seconds to dig in and grab the 9mm. Had to hope like hell it was still loaded. But if Graham was armed, and he would be, it'd take him the same few seconds to grab his weapon.

If he _was_ Graham, he was deadly, and he'd take her down before she could flip the safety. Before she could shoot him in the head. Assuming that would even kill him.

It didn't matter that he saw to her wounds, that he could have let her die already. They wouldn't do that. She knew what the Legion did with women.

She swallowed. "Let me go."

The scarred skin at his eyes furrowed, but Graham's expression hardly changed. "You shouldn't walk on that leg yet," he said slowly.

There was no one else in the cave, that she could see. But there had been people when she arrived, at the water's edge. Tribe people, like the Chalk boy. That's what Caesar did—he gathered up the tribes, and convinced them they were backward and wrong. Changed everything they were. Made them his own. She was far enough east that this might be where he gathered them up from.

"Is this a Legion camp?" It felt like a stupid question, no guarantee he would even answer it truthful. But she had to know the odds. It could be some kind of feeder. Maybe the tribes weren't converted yet. Maybe there was a way out.

Graham closed his eyes and sighed, shaking his head. "No."

He mumbled something under his breath. The same low thing he'd been saying earlier, before he noticed her. She couldn't understand it.

When his hand disappeared behind him, Eddy flinched and tried to sit up, but it hurt too much to move. Then he pulled out the gun she knew he was reaching for—a dark pistol even smaller than the one she kept.

She gritted her teeth and stared him down.

But all he did was eject the magazine into his other hand, hold both up for her to see, and toss the pieces clattering onto the rock floor between them.

"You don't have to go for your gun," he said. "You're safe here."

He leaned forward in the chair, elbows on his knees. It was a vulnerable position. It gave up ground and space. Like a cat rolling onto his back, belly up—it sent a message.

But cats lie, for the fun of it. To trap you, while they get out their claws.

"That so?" She let her head fall against the cool cave wall. The jagged edges scratched her scalp, pleasantly painful. "The Legion wants me dead."

His eyes steeled and narrowed. "If you know who I am, who I was—"

"Everybody does," she cut in.

Even with all the bandages, she could see the irritated tightness in jaw. "Then you know they want me dead, too. The feeling, as it happens, is mutual."

He stood abruptly, the chair scratching the cave floor beneath him, and walked to a murky recess cut out of the rock face. He reached inside. Metal scrapes and clangs echoed out while he searched for something within.

One of the strangest things about the Legion, Eddy learned in her years as a courier, was that they just couldn't shut up. Didn't see the point in it, apparently. They wanted you to know all about them. It was part of their trade. If they had secrets, they were well-buried, or their tongues were cut out.

So every New Californian south of San Francisco knew about the Burned Man. Knew about the beating the Legion took at Hoover Dam under the Legate, and the awful example Caesar made of him.

That was part of their trade, too. Spreading their stories and pumping them up so much that by the time a kid in Junktown heard about the Malpais Legate, he was ten feet tall and bulletproof, more monster than man and indestructible—until the great Caesar decided he was pretty damned destructible, after all.

Maybe there was a little truth to those stories. What she saw before her was a man, not too tall or big, but alive, and more or less undestroyed.

If the Legion knew he was alive, too, they kept their traps shut about it.

And that was the fucking rub of it. She didn't know if the man she saw was still true to Caesar beneath all those scars, even if he said otherwise. Doing Legion work out here in the wilderness of the east, where no one could stop it.

There was a long, sharp metal whine. Graham pulled hard on something from the rocky crevice, and dragged it out: a footlocker.

He carried it, and it looked heavy, over to the flat outcrop where Eddy was still curled up in the cot, silent and watching. With his foot, he swept the magazine and pistol out of the way, and set the footlocker on the ground.

Graham flipped open the lock clasps and pushed back the lid.

Inside was a mass of busted guns and other broken weapons. He showed them to her one by one. A cracked anti-materiel rifle. The remains of an exploded C-4 demolition charge. A spear, snapped in half. A ripper knife, its sawblade bent.

"These are a few of the weapons I kept from the Legion assassins who have come for me," he said, dropping a rusted machete into the locker. "I have never enjoyed killing, not even in my darkest hours. But I will defend myself, so that I may live to see out my purpose."

Eddy didn't want to ask what the purpose was. Only crazy people talked like that. But the collection was a sight.

Caesar was wrong. Something was keeping this man alive, beyond all reason.

"Why'd you keep 'em?" she asked.

He looked up at her. Seemed like he forgot he wasn't alone, lost as he was in blood-soaked memory. "Ah, well... Humility is a virtue. It could have been any one of these weapons, or the men who wielded them, who sent me to my maker. But no matter how they endeavor, and they do, the assassins cannot seem to kill me."

Graham studied her. "For a moment, I thought you were another one sent to try."

So he wanted her gun in this box, too. At least that made sense. She lifted her chin. "I kill a lot of Legionaries, if that's what you're gettin' at."

He blinked. "Then I thank God I am not one of those any longer."

The lid fell shut, and Graham shoved it into a dark, mildewed corner. He sat down in the chair, and dragged it—and himself—closer to her cot.

"I used to collect the bullets from NCR snipers, as well," he said. "The ones I could find, or pull out of my body. Those I left with the Legion." He folded his hands in his lap. "A morbid collection, I know."

It wasn't something she would admit to him, but—she understood that. She half-wished she'd kept some mementos like that along the way. But she had the 9mm. That was enough.

"I've danced with a few of those assassin posses myself. They're tough," she said. She had the scars, and the bullets dug out of her own flesh, to prove it.

Graham nodded slowly. "Judging by the fact that you're here and alive, they've utterly failed when it comes to you. I thank God for that, too."

Eddy didn't know what to say to that. No one had ever been thankful she was alive. House, the doc, even her companions—when she stayed alive, they were probably relieved, at best. Not thankful. She was a good hand, but expendable, in the end. Even Yes-Man was more necessary to keep plugged in. She stroked the painful throbbing in her thigh and looked away into the darkness of the cave.

"No harm will come to you here. From us," he added, gesturing to her leg. "I showed you this for a reason."

When he didn't say anything more, and looked at her like she could read his mind, she said, "Well, go on, then."

Graham leaned forward again. His eyes damn near glowed in the lantern light.

"We need your help here. The particulars don't matter, until you're well enough." His gaze drifted toward her legs beneath the cover, and leisurely back up to meet her eyes.

"To make things simpler, I ask you to trust me. Though my sins are known to you, I am not of the Legion. I am a New Canaanite before anything else. I trust in the Lord, and the Lord brought you here."

Graham spoke with the conviction of a man with nothing else he could hold onto. Not even himself.

"I'll think about it," Eddy said. She had nothing else to do, it seemed. Couldn't walk, couldn't run. No one had tried to kill her yet.

He nodded and stood again, slowly this time, and his stare never left hers, even as he lifted the chair and placed it against the cave wall.

"Rest now," he said. He bent to the floor, collected the pistol case and magazine, and turned toward the cool dark of the outer cave.

Eddy yanked the cover up to her chin and lay back, carefully stretching her legs, restacking the worn, woven blankets beneath her feet. She turned to the side, to watch the cave and the distant firelight until she could sleep again.

Graham had not yet left. He stood with his back to her, reloading the magazine and checking the barrel.

"Hey," she called out.

He holstered the gun and half-turned, looking back over his shoulder. "Yes?"

"Anybody else in here?"

"Not at the moment."

Her eyes settled on a torch in the west corner. It flickered softly and cast a glow on the cave wall, and tall, sharp shadows all around.

"Who were you talking to when I woke up?" she asked. "I heard you."

A soft, muffled laugh escaped him. "To God. I was praying for you."

Graham stepped into the dark. Eddy closed her eyes and counted his steps as they echoed through the cave.


	3. Chapter 3

_—Now—_

The path trailed up into the warm blue night. There were no torches to light the way along the narrow, winding cliff. Only the stars, and the sliver of new moon perched among them.

Dust kicked up while they tracked their way. Joshua hiked ahead, Eddy close behind. He stepped careful and quiet, didn't move too fast. She followed his feet, her eyes on his boots. If there was sun, you might see her bootprints in the dirt on top of his. She echoed his steps, one by one.

The cliff drop at her side was stark, a black expanse that met the path and felt a lot less empty than it looked. A trick of her eyes, of the night. Every time she thought she'd got used to the heights, and the falls, in Zion, another one got her, sharp in the gut. She rubbed the sweat from her palms onto her corduroys.

"It's dark," she said, as though that weren't plain. But neither of them had said anything since they started walking. It wasn't comfortable. Seemed like he was waiting for something. Waiting for her.

"You can see ok up there?" she asked.

"My vision is very good, even in the dark." He stepped over the spiky reach of a lonely saltbush sprung out of the rock.

She took the same long step over the bush after he'd passed. "Oh. Not mine." That was what Cass would call a grave fuckin' understatement. It was why she picked up any glasses she came upon, no matter how wretched or ugly. In case hers broke, like they always did.

"I know," he said, slowing up as he led her around a curve in the cliff. "I've seen you shoot."

Eddy breathed in sharp, lips pursed, ready to spew curses and say it was a damned lie. Then her stomach lurched hard.

On the other side of the sharp corner was a thin rope bridge, swaying in the night. The kind of decrepit little bridge that was all over Zion. The kind she would walk an extra three miles to avoid.

The boards were mostly unbroken. Far as she could see, anyway. Which wasn't much.

"You should go first," Joshua said. He was encouraging, but it sounded like he was weighing each word. "I will be right behind you."

She wasn't afraid of it. _She_ wasn't afraid of much in this dry-assed world, not even dying. It was only that her feet were stuck in the dust where she stood. They didn't want to move.

"Or, I can lead you." Joshua crossed his arms and leaned back on his heels. "If you can't see the way."

"I can see," she snapped.

Just like that her boots picked up, and she stomped up to the bridge and onto the first rickety board. Her sweaty hands fumbled at the guide ropes, gripping hard, and she trudged onward.

Joshua's boots knocked against the boards she'd already left. He was behind her, like he told her he'd be. Would've been a comfort if she weren't so pissed off.

"You know," she said, "you didn't complain about my sight, _or_ my shots, when we were on the White Legs." The next board wobbled in a way she didn't like. She stepped clear over it. "So I don't find all this very fair of you."

"Perhaps not fair." He was a board back. He'd caught up quick. "But it is true. I can't imagine who taught you to shoot. No one, I suppose."

"Well, you sure don't flatter, do you? I get the job done," she muttered. The ends of the guide ropes were a few feet ahead, tied to metal poles driven into the rock. She took two hard steps forward, grabbed for a pole, and hauled herself up onto the cliff with a deep sigh. Old terra firma never felt so good.

Eddy turned to watch Joshua calmly step off the bridge, and up to where she stood. "You speak the truth—I don't flatter. But it helped you get across, didn't it?"

He leaned forward, close to her ear, and said quietly, as though anyone were around to overhear, "Best to have faith, and put your mind toward something else, when fears take hold."

Then he pulled back. He'd needled her on purpose. She'd learned to read him by now, even with all his face hidden under that white gauze. Amused, he was. He must not have left all that sadism behind with Caesar, after all.

"I can shoot," she said.

"You can." He scanned the trail ahead, his eyes drifting up the mountain. "Though not perfectly." His gaze fell back to her. "God did not grant us all the same gifts."

Joshua Graham was an impossible person. Eddy was sorry she'd ever met him.

No—that wasn't true. Not at all.

She shook her head. "Not sure he granted me any." It wasn't like her to wallow. But a person had to take a hard look at themselves and their life every once in a while. That wasn't wallowing.

And her life had not been a sunny day at the lake, not by a Mojave mile. Nothing to do with the courier job that kicked up so much trouble. No, her mama said there were dark clouds the day she was born, and they followed her the whole way.

If Joshua saw any of those clouds pass over her now, he didn't show it. His eyes were soft on her again. So was his voice. "Oh, He did, indeed. Yours are far, far finer than mine."

Then his hand fell upon her shoulder. There was the lightest press of his fingertips on her hard muscle. The warm cup of his palm, the heat of him through her shirt.

She wondered if he ran hot, with all his ravaged skin. What his skin looked like, _felt_ like, beneath the bandages. She wondered a lot of things she shouldn't.

Joshua let her shoulder go, and his fingertips trailed down her arm. He walked away, to another curved cliffside that led up, around a tall column of red rock.

Eddy stared after him. Of all the fucking people in this blasted world, why _this_ rotten, self-righteous bastard? Why was he the one whose touch made her chest ache like she'd been punched with a power fist? Hell if she knew. 

In these four months, they talked. A lot. From the beginning, he respected her, and she feared him—or his legend, his past—enough to keep a good clear distance. Something changed. Something got twisted up and made him talk to her like that. Made her look for him when he wasn't around. Made her stay.

If she could lay it all out on paper, or draw it in the canyon dust, maybe she could see what happened, when. Maybe it didn't matter what happened. Only that it had. And here they were.

She jogged over to the trail before she lost him entirely.

Joshua waited for her where the pebbled path grew steep, and widened. It flattened out where he stood, into a plateau. One foot propped on a jagged slab that jutted from the rock wall along the path, he was watching for her. As she scrambled up the trail, he held out a hand to help her up.

"Up here," he said. She took his hand, still hot, in her own. His grip was strong and hard—but so was hers. He pulled, and she pushed. They met on the flat ground, on equal footing.

The plateau was wider than she could see from the trailhead, and empty. This high up, there wasn't much—a withered, windbeaten juniper bent over the cliffside, a few scrubs of broom and thirsty dock in the dirt. A cave couched the plateau. The dark mouth looked deeper than the night sky. No light at all.

Joshua stepped out onto the open plateau, a few feet from the edge. "No overhangs. No trees." He swept the dust from his forearms and looked at her. "A clear view."

He spoke the truth, alright. There was nothing between them and the stars but their clothes. And billions of miles of space, she figured.

You could see all of Zion from here. You could trace the tops of the mountains in the air like they were little hills. You could follow the glittery snakeskin of the Virgin twisting through the canyon.

"It's perfect," Eddy said. And wouldn't you know it, right then: another star tumbled down.

It was cooler up here, like she thought it might be. She rolled the sleeves of her old shirt down, and gripped the cuffs in her fists. There was hardly even a rock to lean against in this barren spot. She moved to the middle of the open space, away from the cliff that rattled her, and hugged her arms tight around herself.

The white cat tail arced overhead, and the stars in the middle sparkled, a mess of colors. Shinier than anything on this Earth. The spidery, smoky streaks that curled around the stars made them look even brighter.

Were there other planets out there like this one, half-destroyed with its shitty wars and shittier people? Other Zions, other idiots like her staring up clueless at the sky from wherever they stood? Did those idiots have someone nearby who made them feel at peace, and like they'd never know peace again, all at the same time?

Joshua was next to her, his own neck craned up. He had his arms crossed, his stance assured, as always. For someone who said he was never comfortable, he sure looked relaxed most of the time. She guessed he had to act better than he felt. Everybody does, in their way.

"I come here sometimes, to watch the heavens." His voice was quiet, and low. "Do you mind if I stay with you?"

He didn't look at her when he asked. She didn't turn to him when she answered.

"I'd like it if you did."

She thought she heard him make a noise, a faint hum in his throat.

"Thank you," he said.

Well. If they were going to be there a while, best sit down and find their ease.

She crouched to the ground and sat back, stretched her legs out in the dirt. Her scuffed and muddy boots, the soles mercifully whole, kicked up a little dust storm. It swirled up around her feet.

Joshua followed her lead, bending carefully to the ground, guiding himself down with practiced apprehension. He knew all the movements he could make by now. He'd been in discomfort, if not outright agony, for so long, she figured. She couldn't fucking imagine how he felt. And he wasn't real talkative about it, so imagination was all she had.

Sometimes it was hard to keep on a short leash.

There was a sharp, cold prickle at the base of her spine. The 9mm moved when she sat, sliding into her pants and down to her ass in a very awkward fashion. Eddy pulled it out. The pearl grip was heavy in her hand. She was glad it was so dark she couldn't see the lady.

She set it on the ground. A foot or so away, a foot or so back. Out of sight, but not out of mind.

Joshua watched her all the while. He shouldn't have found it odd to be armed, even here and now, at night in the peaceable valley, no White Legs, no storm drums. But he must have seen something in the wary way she handled the gun. How she didn't want to leave it too far from her reach.

"Are you still afraid here?" he asked. It wasn't what he meant. She could hear the meaning, underneath. _Are you still afraid of me?_

Her eyes were adjusting to the dark. She could see him clear enough. One knee bent, arm slung on top of it, he leaned on his leg and turned to her, an easy posture. But she could feel the tension burning off him, hard and questioning.

"No," she said. And she meant it.

He knew enough of her past by now, but he couldn't understand what the gun was to her. Maybe one day she'd let it go. Maybe one day she wouldn't care anymore. It wouldn't be anytime soon.

She sighed and squeezed the back of her neck. The muscles were all stiff from looking up. _Fuck it,_ she thought, and she leaned back, laid down her head onto the dusty rock.

The view was better, flat on the ground, staring straight up. The plateau was cool beneath her. It felt like floating, like those dreams where you jerk awake scared because you're falling through the air. But there was half a mile of solid rock under her. She was safe. She wasn't afraid.

She was only a little surprised when Joshua lay down on the rock beside her with a soft grunt, as close as the gun, but not so cold.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: this chapter goes into Eddy's past, and there are some oblique references to sexual abuse in her teenage years, but nothing graphic. I've updated the fic tags to reflect this, but I apologize that it's coming a little late.

_—3 months ago—_

  
They circled around Eddy in the cave and listened and laughed, the tribe kids.

Guess they weren't kids, really. Not any more than she had been when she struck out from Oak Creek, after she broke free from the ranch. She thought she was grown, then. Thought she could take care of herself, since no one else would.

Back then she had nothing but a dead man's clothes, and a knife, and swiped stacks of NCR cash. Back then she had nobody. At least these kids had tribe.

Follows-Chalk told them some of the things she said while they were clambering up boulders and breaking into cobwebbed old ranger stations. Eddy blabbed to pass the time, and he asked so many damn questions—well, it'd be rude not to answer.

He wanted to know everything about the rest of the world. Whatever he couldn't see from his cave at Dead Horse Point, or even from the peaks here in Zion. He wanted to know about caps, and casinos, and courier jobs. He wanted to know what her life was like. Sad and shitty as it was, she guessed it was different to him.

And to his friends.

So five or six of them at a time, Dead Horses scouts and some Sorrows, too, led by Follows-Chalk, they would find her at a down time. They never bothered her when she was dead on her feet from scouting their taboo places, or hungover sticking her head in the river, or had too much talking for one day. Their favorite time to ask her for stories was when she was in Angel Cave, reloading casings or cleaning her rifle.

Eddy found it suited her, too.

The reloading bench was tall enough to let her sit on a rusty stool, rest her old tired ass, and do two of her favorite things: make ammo and talk shit.

"Well, I didn't _want_ to kill him," she told the kids.

She pushed out the spent primer from an old brass casing in the press. It clinked onto the metal table. It was one twang among the soft metallic brush of weapons being inspected, cleaned and loaded. That sound echoed in the cave from another table, where Graham sat. Alone among the rest of them, with his little .45s, more than she'd ever seen in one place.

Eddy didn't favor a gun like that. A big brush gun, and big 45-70 gov't slugs like she was reloading now—those made her feel good and ready. The 9mm she kept around for other reasons. Like she'd kept that knife she ran away with, kept it until it didn't make her sick to look at it anymore.

"Nope, I didn't want to, even though he'd been meaner than a shot gecko to me, so he deserved it." McCaffrey. What an asshole.

Follows-Chalk giggled, excited to hear how the story turned out, even though he'd heard it already. The rest of the kids waited.

"Hell, I don't want to kill _anybody,_ unless I have a reason." She took a clump of bunched up steel wire and scrubbed at the brass, hoping it was clean enough so the charge didn't blow up on her later. "Being paid to is no good reason, not if you can talk it out. Defending yourself is. Revenge is."

She blew the residue from her fingernails. "Now revenge isn't something to take lightly. You have to be willing to die, because it'll kill _you_ if you don't kill _them._"

"That happen to you, Eddy?" Follows-Chalk asked. He had asked it before.

"Yep." She lined up the empty casings before her, a row of shiny brass soldiers ready for duty. "More than once. But that's for another day."

Someone cleared his throat, a sharp warning. It was Daniel.

He had taken up a dry, flat rock ringed by ferns, his map spread out on his crossed legs. An oil lamp beside him lit him from below, and the dark beard shadowed his face. He didn't even look up, only _ahem_-ed his disapproval, and pulled a pencil from behind his ear to scratch out a note on the map.

He hated her stories, and he hated that she told them to the Sorrows. No one was as pure of heart and mind as Daniel thought the Sorrows were. Once you were born into this world you were part of it, even in Zion. And nobody got their soul stained by hearing a fool-headed story they half-understood, anyway.

So Eddy ignored him.

"So McCaffrey wouldn't budge. I even cut him a deal," she said, oiling the empty casings with a rag and a tin of yao guai fat. "Just give me your hat, I said. Then the Garretts'll think you're dead and we can both _turn the other cheek."_

Maybe she shouldn't have said that last part, because Daniel looked at her then, full of weary anger. The soft clicks of safety pulls stopped. Graham put the .45 he was cleaning down onto his table.

Daniel sighed, and it was the loudest damn sigh she ever heard. "I remember when they used to sit at _your_ feet like this, Joshua," he said, his voice shaky with poorly hidden disgust. "I suppose tales of sin and violence are always in fashion. The newer, the better."

Graham said nothing. He went back to his guns. Like he knew it would piss Daniel off more than an argument, or a cold response.

Daniel folded his map, picked up the lantern and stalked off. He was protective of his heart, and he didn't tolerate bad influences, like her. It didn't bother her none, not personally, but she couldn't relate to that.

The kids didn't react at all. They didn't feel the judgment in Daniel's words, because it wasn't meant for them.

She watched Graham lift a lantern from somewhere on the ground and light the wick. He placed it on the desk, at the corner, and picked up another .45. He smoothly flipped the pistol on his finger and checked the barrel, with a practiced eye, like he'd done it his whole life.

He couldn't have told the tribe people much, she figured, in those tales, if they let him stay—if they didn't string him up for all he'd done. Or maybe they _were_ bloodthirsty things. They seemed sweet. Practical, unlike Daniel, but sweet.

No, Graham kept it pretty tight. At least with her. Hadn't said much to her since that first day. He asked after her leg, gave her food and bandages and alcohol. Not that she didn't have her own, but his was hard grain for cleaning and wounds, and not so tasty as her shrinking stash of bourbon.

He hadn't given her reason to be afraid, like he said. He'd been kind to her. It didn't make much sense, but she took it as it was. Really, it was enough that he didn't give her the stink eye like his missionary friend.

"Anyway," she said to the kids, "he wouldn't give me the hat. Flat refused. Wanted to fight me. I didn't get it." She shook out black gunpowder into a tiny cup and reached for a bent tin funnel.

"So I had to fight him. Once I shot him dead, then I knew. I lifted that hat off his head, and he was balder than a baby's ass."

Follows-Chalk laughed, too hard, like she was doing stand-up at the Wrangler and he was her own little audience plant. The other kids followed his lead.

She funneled a few grains into each casing, never very careful about the measurements. It drove Boone crazy. _Gonna blow your face off like that. Let me._ Sometimes she let him. He asked for nothing else, really. Bastard wouldn't even ask for water when he was thirsty. Fuck knows what would happen to him without her.

Boone thought she babied him, but he _was_ a baby, to her. A big, grumpy baby. She missed him.

"McCaffrey died so nobody would see his bald head. Stupid, huh?" she said.

The kids all nodded.

The bullets twisted into the casings without a fight. The yao guai fat bunched up around the edge and greased her hands.

"When I brought the hat back to Francine Garrett, she put it straight on and laughed. She was so happy she damn near danced, and she let me take Fisto for a—"

Shit. Eddy held the bullet press handle and looked over it at the tribe kids, sitting on the cave floor around her. They stared up at her, bright and happy and... innocent, maybe.

They didn't need to know about the Wrangler, and what kind of nonsense drunks and degenerates like her got up to. Maybe Daniel had a few things right.

"Well," she said. "Francine paid me real good." She brought the handle down and crimped the bullet in tight. "Okay, that's all for now, get outta here."

She pressed a few more bullets and didn't look up. Follows-Chalk led the rest of the kids away, shuffling through passage toward the sunlight. He knew her moods by now.

Then there was Graham, and Eddy. At different tables, working at what they seemed to like best. Alone. Together.

The cave sounded like the back room at the Gun Runners' place—the quiet metal press of the reloader, the finished bullets chiming against each other in a pile, the spring of magazines shunting into the body of a gun.

Eddy kept an eye on Graham, but she didn't expect him to speak.

He stacked a pile of pistols into a weapons locker near his feet and locked it shut. Then he leaned onto the desk in front of him.

"May I ask you a question?"

She paused, the press lever in her hand, and glanced at him from the corner of her eye. She considered saying no. But curiosity got the better of her.

"Shoot."

His burned and bandaged fingers were steepled near his covered mouth. He took a moment before he spoke again.

"What you said before," he said slowly, "about revenge. You spoke from experience."

The bullet boxes she kept for 45-70s were all torn and water-warped. She dumped a few finished bullets into an empty box and looked at him. "That's not a question."

His eyes in the lantern light were a sharp blue, like broken glass. "What happened?"

She sighed. Figured that he would dig in like that. "Which time?"

"Begin at the beginning," he said.

Most people in the wastes didn't sniff around anybody else's history. Maybe they thought it was rude. Maybe they only cared about themselves. Sometimes even asking _where you from?_ could get you a cold shoulder, or a threat.

Probably most folk were relieved to make it as far as they had, and they wanted to leave whatever hard times they'd lived through in the past. No sense crying about it now.

So Eddy barely knew how to answer him, or whether she wanted tell the truth. No one ever asked about her like that. Just like he'd been glad she lived. Just like he prayed for her.

Why was he like that with her? He'd been foul and evil for so long, now he had to see if he could be good? Because he _had_ been good to her, and to the tribes, even though it didn't make a bit of sense, with what she knew of him.

Or maybe he wanted to see how bad she was, deep down. To protect his heart, like Daniel.

Either way, he asked.

Her jaw got tight like it didn't want to open up and speak. But she did anyway, and told him what she'd never told anyone before.

"My mama took me to a big brahmin ranch in Oak Creek when I was 14. Left me there. Told me she couldn't feed me anymore, I was getting too grown. She said I'd be a maid there."

Eddy brought down the bullet press, hard. The workings clanged against each other and rang in her ear. "That brahmin baron, he had a lot of _maids._ They told me mama only made fifty dollars off me. Guess I wasn't that cute," she said with a broken laugh, and looked at Graham.

The raw fingertips rested against his bandaged face. He stared at her, his eyes wide and clear.

She didn't care what he thought of her. He couldn't judge her for anything she'd done.

"I lasted about eight months there," she said, and took the ready bullet from the press. Eight months of bad food and fights with the other girls and yeah, she did have to clean the house and wash the dishes, when the ranch owner didn't want her... "Before I decided it was him or me."

She knocked him out and tied him to his bed. She'd watched the ranch hands with their ropes—she learned quick.

"No one knew who did it. Everyone wanted to kill him, you see, and girls ran away all the time. I was long gone by the time they found him." Surrounded by empty pill bottles, needles sticking out of his arms, his neck cut up with the knife. To tell the truth she wasn't sure what had done the job, but he wasn't breathing and he couldn't touch her.

That's what she wanted. That's when she split with the money she stole, and the knife, and whatever else she could find in his closet.

Eddy pulled out another empty 45-70 box. "I heard the wife got the mark for it. She hated him more than anyone. NCR put her in front of a firing line." She wasn't too sad to hear that. The old hag had a hand in everything that happened.

And there wasn't any more to say about it. She funneled more powder into the next line of casings.

Graham pushed his chair back, screeching on the rock floor, and stood. She watched him walk over and stop at the edge of the reloading bench. His fingers curled against the rust-rotten metal. She couldn't tell if he still had fingernails or not.

"I am sorry that happened to you," he said, his voice low and warm.

She shrugged, and twisted in another bullet. _The Malpais Legate can't be much better. Even if he's_ sorry _now._ Worse happened to people all the time, anyway.

"What then?"

"_Then_ I got sick down in the Boneyard, someone dragged me to the Followers, and they took me in." Eddy sighed impatiently and wiped the fat from her hands onto her pants. "Why all the questions? You wanna know my recipe for radscorp casserole, too?"

Graham folded his arms across his chest. "Follows-Chalk told me a different story. About your courier work. But I thought it best to hear directly from you."

"Oh, that," she said. She crimped the brass around the bullet. "Somebody killed me. I had to kill him back."

He didn't move. The lantern was behind him now, and she couldn't see his eyes. "Elaborate," he said with weak sarcasm.

So she told him the story she was tired of telling by now. The thing that everyone else seemed to know already, even people who didn't know _her._ She supposed he should know, too.

Know how far she would go to do what had to be done.

It wasn't the first or last time, but it was the one that mattered now.

By the time she finished, she had no more bullets to make. They lay in a few shiny stripes on the bench—dull, flat silver at each end, not-quite-gleaming brass in the center.

Graham nodded absently while she spoke, and dropped his arms to his side. He was hard to read. He didn't move the way other people did, with their nervous itching, or picking at their clothes or hair. He was so still and measured in his movements, it made him seem perfectly self-assured. But no one was really like that, even if they pretended to be. Not even him.

Everyone had fear and anger circling inside them like a hot desert thunderstorm. With Graham, it showed in his eyes.

It made her think the storm inside him must be stronger than most, because he chose to look so calm.

He turned to his own desk, picked up the lantern, and brought it to her bench. She squinted against the close, bright light. Maybe he found her hard to read, too.

"We have much in common." He declared it, like it couldn't be argued. "Has that occurred to you, as well?"

Eddy tensed on the hard stool, and her nostrils flared. Her own storm swirled up to say no, to argue and deny it.

But she had the same thoughts sometimes, in dark moments when she looked across a fire, or the river, or this cave they were in and saw him there. From more of a distance, in times past, she would have seen a monster, and she would have hunted him with no remorse—with pleasure, if she had been tasked with it.

Up close, he was shattered, a raw nerve exposed, howling with shame and rage despite his silence and stillness.

And what all that amounted to is that he was a man. Like she was a woman.

Their paths had never crossed, but they ran parallel. Two dark roads broken as a Mojave highway.

"I guess we do," she said.

He looked deeply into her eyes. Her sight had settled in the light, and the lantern lit him from below. There was a dark shadow beneath his eyes, and where she should have seen his mouth.

"Both murdered, and come back to life. Both too tempted by the sin of wrath. Caesar wants the both of us to die, yet the best of his men cannot manage it. Both of us seem to have a terrible strength."

There was more. She wished he wouldn't go on. But he couldn't—he didn't know anything she had not said out loud. Though if anyone could see into her black heart, she feared it would be Joshua Graham.

He leaned onto the reloading bench, closer to her, and spoke softly. "I hope you use your strength to a good purpose. The Lord knows I try," he said, and glanced upward, toward the wet sharp points on the cave ceiling. "Yet I fail each day to find such grace."

The low whisper of his voice broke then.

"You are young, and whole," he told her.

Eddy laughed under her breath. "Not that young." 38, the number on the casino. Lucky 38. They'd had a party for her, on her birthday. First one she'd ever had. They wouldn't wait on her there, she thought, if she stayed here too long.

_Not all that whole, either,_ _but I can hide it better._

He shook his head, though there was kindness in his eyes, like there had been when he asked how she felt, or brought her roast fish and water in that cot.

"You have time and opportunities I never will again," he said. "Don't waste either on ghosts."

Then he was quiet. After he stared at her for a few more moments, he pushed away from the bench and headed toward the mouth of the cave.

It was a relief. He did not really know her. How broken she was already.

He was wrong about another thing, too. She would never get away from ghosts.

She was just talking to one. She was one.

Eddy swept the last line of bullets into an empty box, and brushed the dark gunpowder from her shaking hands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, everyone, for reading! This is the most fun I've had writing in a long time and I hope that comes across. I'm very excited about where the story is going... thank you again!


	5. Chapter 5

_—Now—_

The stars stopped falling. 

At least, Eddy hadn't seen one in a good while. They were only little lights, quick as a hiccup against the dark sky, and she only had two bad eyes behind these glasses. It would be easy to miss a few. Easier when there were some other things on her mind.

Up on the plateau, it was still, and hushed. Not a breeze to cool her skin, not a night bird's call to pierce the air. There was one noise. A faint, faraway hiss droned on, neverending—the Virgin, on its slow slide through the canyon. 

Everything else had gone quiet. Even the two of them. 

Joshua rested beside her, hands folded on his stomach. It was hard to see in the dark, without turning over to look at him, if he was watching the sky. Hard not to make it obvious that she was watching _him_, flat on her back next to him, still as the air around them. 

He hadn't spoken in some time. A few sighs, that sounded content and calm—good sighs. He seemed at ease. From the corner of her eye, she watched his stomach rise and fall with his breath. It was muffled by the bandages, but she could hear that, too. It was soft.

She paid too much attention to him.

"You asleep over there?" she asked. A half-whisper, in case he really was.

But he laughed, a short, rough breath. "No more than you." 

So it was the two of them lying side by side in the dark, then. 

She'd grown accustomed to the coolness, and the rock beneath them still held some warmth from the late summer day. She'd even got used to Joshua near her, to the quiet rhythm of his breathing. 

A warm, dizzy feeling floated up inside her, and she smiled to herself. Whatever was between them, that wasn't canyon dust and air—right then? She was contented, too. 

There was nothing in the world for her to do but lay there with that sky glittering above her, and pick out the shapes she remembered. 

The belt. The arrow. The scales.

"I sleep," Joshua said, "but my heart waketh." 

It was that deep, solemn voice he used when he spoke from his scripture, but soft, again. There was so much she didn't understand in what he read, or quoted, to her, but to hear him speak it was its own pleasure. 

"Our bed is green. The beams of our house are cedar, and our rafters of fir." 

_Our bed,_ he said. Her smile faded, and her eyes went wide. He was quoting like always. Nothing around them was green, anyway. 

_Discomfited._ The word, not one she'd ever used, popped into her head. 

Arcade and Veronica were arguing over deathclaw omelets in the 38's kitchen. She said _discomfort_ was the same thing in usage and when would Arcade pull the dictionary out of his ass and actually read it sometime. He said it meant acute embarrassment and frustration, a more delicate and pointed pain than simple discomfort. Neither one would back down, and probably hadn't yet. 

To Eddy's fool ears, it had sounded like Arcade had the truth of it. He usually did, and he knew it. Now she could could tell him how it felt.

Eddy was discomfited by Joshua's words. By how she liked lying beside him. How she watched all his little movements.

It had been a while since she felt anything like that, for more than a minute. She usually didn't let it live long. Long enough that she could shake it loose, so it didn't grab a foothold in her. 

Nothing good had ever come of all that. Wasn't hardly worth it, even for the fun of it. Even if she wanted it, now and then.

One time she leaned close to Raul, watching his strong, scarred hands at work on an old toaster. When she handed him a screwdriver, he said _Thanks, boss,_ real low and sweet by her ear. It shot straight through her like the first hit of wasteland tequila. 

One time Swank came up behind her while she watched a show at the Aces. He brushed her hair back, his rough fingertips swept across her neck, and he leaned down to whisper something pointless that she forgot as soon she heard it. Then he set down a fresh rum & Nuka and left without another word.

There were other times, other men. She hadn't done anything about it in years.

Sometimes it was better to imagine what could be, instead of making something out of nothing, looking like a fool. Maybe it was _was_ better to protect your heart, like the New Canaanites seemed to. Put all that out of your mind, and move on.

For now, the night had its own fine qualities. 

"I _could_ sleep here," she said, and if she had been by herself, she might've let her eyes drift shut and block out those stars. Let the night surround her. Wake up cold, and alone. 

Joshua hummed, a thoughtful sound. "That seems to me a waste of a blessed night." 

"Blessed?" She stressed the front of it, like he did. 

"Don't you think so?" His arm raised, the one that wasn't next to her, and he gestured up toward the sky.

Blessed. Who knew what that meant to him? It could be as holy as one of his prayers, or as ordinary as an everyday sunrise. 

Eddy laughed quietly. "I don't know how I'd know."

He turned then, so small a turn you almost couldn't tell, unless you were watching close. His shoulders shifted up, his body angled itself a little to his left. Toward her. His head drifted to the side, to look her way. 

"You don't believe the things I've told you. And read to you." His voice was gentle, but there was a sadness at the back of it, like he didn't mean to let it out. 

That was their way, the New Canaanites. Their good news, their holy book. Those things wrote out the path they took through the world. Those were what mattered most. He wanted to share it with her. He would have done that with anybody, she figured. Though she never saw him read to the Dead Horses or Sorrows, the way Daniel did. 

"Perhaps you will," he said. "In time." 

A breeze picked up then, and swept over the plateau. It ruffled the loose ends of her hair across her shoulders. It had a juniper smell to it, dark and sharp. She breathed in deep. 

Belief wasn't something which came natural to Eddy. Neither did trust. Belief was like a sarsaprilla cap—worth something because everybody said it was. Trust was the rare blue star on the inside. Belief could get you killed, if you were dumb enough not to second-guess. And keep your gun loaded. 

And trust? Trust was not a thing—it was a process. A long road, with so many damned curves and breaks you could lose your way. 

So she wasn't sure she would ever believe. But she could feel. She _felt_ something when Joshua spoke his word. When he told her about salvation. He was so sure about it, nothing would move him. She wondered what it was like, to be like him. 

Maybe she didn't show it, but the things he told her—she thought about them a lot. Forgiveness. Sacrifice.

Forgiving was not in her. And she was fine with that.

At her side, Joshua laid his hand on the rock between them. Inches from her hip. 

Here in Zion, the idea had come to her, quietly, like it had always been there: it was not up to her to forgive Joshua Graham. 

Or for anyone in this blasted world she had wronged to forgive her. Anyone she'd let live. 

People like her, like him—they left a lot of blood in their wake. It stained them as sure as they were breathing. It could not be washed clean, like it was never there, no matter what Joshua's book said. 

But there could be a balance. She could give of herself sometimes, and do things right. Like those scales she could pick out in the stars. Weigh the blood against the good. 

Could be it was enough to do that, just about half the time. To look for a way to be good. Like Joshua had done. 

She had judged him once. It made her feel mighty tall, to look down on him for what he was. Made her feel so good about all the things she'd done, the things that broke into her dreams and woke her up in a cold sweat. The things she couldn't forget. It was easy to think: _at least I'm not_ him.

Now she knew better. And maybe she _had_ learned that from the things he said. From his good book.

Beside her, Joshua lay still and easy, his eyes on the stars again. If he thought he knew any of what was in her mind tonight, her thoughts racing in all directions like a frenzied ant—well, that would be all he knew. Wasn't any way she could tell him in words. 

Eddy pulled her feet in, knees up, and squirmed against the rock below her. There were ridges and ruts that felt sharp and good, scratching her back through the worn-thin flannel of her shirt. She couldn't help but let out a little groan when it hit a good, sore spot on her shoulder blade. 

His head turned back to face her. That time it was not a subtle movement. He huffed, a hard breath that she could hear easy. There was no seeing in the dark for her, even up close, but she could feel his eyes on her. 

He was paying attention to her, too. 

She stopped scratching and looked straight up. 

Directly above the plateau, it seemed like, there was another shape she knew: the swan. If swans were still around, they weren't around anywhere she'd ever been. But there were drawings in the old books to show what they looked like. The stars fanned out to make the big wings, the long neck. When she tipped her head back further, and held her glasses up, she could see it clearly. 

She coughed. Like it would push away anything else they were both thinking. "You see that one up there?" 

"A falling star?" 

"No, a shape." She raised her arm straight toward the sky, and pointed. "The swan. The brightest stars connect. They make the swan. Look up." She heard the soft sweep of his bandaged head shift against the rock. "See 'em?" 

"I'm afraid I don't," he said, slow and flat. "Show me." 

"Aw, hell. Look." Her arm still raised, she traced the lines. "There's a big one up top, that's the tail end. There." 

He moved again, his shoulder leaning into hers, his head tilting with it. "Ah. Yes."

"Follow that one down to another, that's the body." She felt his affirmative grunt. "Then down from there, there's a line for the neck, to the head. And the body, out on either side's a wing." She pointed to the shimmering anchor stars that made up the bird shape.

"Oh." He sounded surprised. "It's a cross."

Well, he would see it that way. "A right crooked one, maybe," she said.

"No, it's—" He sighed. "When our Savior was crucified, His body sagged upon the cross as His mortal life gave out. Just so." 

Eddy swallowed. She'd seen some of the old churches and their fixtures. She knew what he meant. But it made her think of other people who were hung up the same, the ones the Legion left to sag and rot at Nipton, or for the crows to peck their guts out along river. Each one she found, she put out of their misery. 

It was the only thing to do. She wanted the Legion dead as much they wanted her to die. They both wanted that now. Past was past. 

"But there are big wings," she insisted. "Longer than that part."

"Where?"

Hell's bells, he talked about _her_ sight. She shifted toward him, and took his arm in her hand. It was heavy—wrapped in thick bandages but muscled, strong from long years of shooting, climbing, who knew what else. 

She leaned her head close up to his, to find his line of sight, and felt the gauze there against the quickening heartbeat in her own temple. 

Eddy pointed with his arm. "There," she said, and swept his hand along the line of stars. "And there."

The whole of him was warm next to her, everywhere they touched: the temple and cheek, his long side, and the parts not blocked by the flak jacket, the soft cotton shirt at his underarm, and his hip. 

His forearm twisted, and his wrist curved around hers. His bent fingers brushed her palm. 

"Thank you," he said, a low, breathy whisper. "I see now."

Her face burned. How many times had she imagined him speaking to her, close and ragged, just like that? And shot the thought out of her own head, like you would some ugly mole rat who burrowed clear into your campsite? It had no right to be there. 

That was why she camped alone so many nights. Seemed like whether she stayed with Dead Horses or Sorrows—when she went to bed, he was in her sight. When she woke up, there he was again. He dug in deep and wouldn't leave. Fuckin' mole rat. 

And here she was curled up next to him, holding his arm, her cheek against his. She was making it all harder on herself. Even if, like the other times, some part of her wanted it. 

Wanted _him_. This wretched, half-dead son of a bitch. She lied to herself all the time. Said she was too hard and old for such notions. Said even if she weren't, he was no kind of man to want. Lies, all lies. 

She lowered both their arms to the ground, and let his go. She moved her face away from his. But they were still so close. She left it that way. 

"Where did you learn the star shapes?" His voice was close, too. It purred into her.

She sighed. "The Followers, in the Boneyard. They had a school. Books." And clean water, and medicine. Women who smiled, who held your hand when you were sick. Men who didn't look at her in that awful way. "I stayed there as long as they let me. Don't remember everything they tried to teach me, but I came out better than I went in."

"The Followers are good people," he said. "I would thank them for helping you, if I could." 

There was a sour underbelly to him saying that, she knew. Not all of them were good. But Caesar wasn't their fault. Learning didn't make him bad. You couldn't keep people stupid and in the dark in case they picked up something they could use against you. You had to be ready for that, and fight it down.

"Did you have schooling?" she asked. 

"Yes." She felt his arm move against hers. His fingers brushed at the rock face between them. "At the church. That was a _long_ time ago," he said, all wry, like he was so ancient. 

"Must've been a good one. You know a lot." The way he spoke and read, and the certainty he had in what he said, she knew he was educated. Like Arcade, and Veronica. Smart, sure, but more than that. Taught he could believe his own words and thoughts, and speak them. There was a difference. 

He laughed softly. "It _was_ good. We learned a great many things, well beyond our religious studies." Then his fingers stilled. 

"Perhaps not enough," he said. His voice was dark with regret. "Not the way the world truly works. Only the way we wished it did."

She watched him, his chest rising and sinking with each hard breath. It was hard to imagine what he'd been like then, a young man with no scars, inside or out. Shit, it was hard to her to picture herself the same way, and she had lived through it. Maybe they became different people, each time they fought, and died. They were newly made, over and over. 

Eddy turned back to the swan. She didn't know what Joshua wanted with her. Didn't know if he wanted anything. What if it was all in her mind? The soft talk, the touch, the heat that burned her. Her brain was full of shrapnel and bad decisions, faulty and dumb at the best of times. It couldn't be trusted. 

So this was enough. It was probably all she could even handle. A quiet night under a beautiful sky. A conversation and space to think. A friend. She thought she could call him that now. 

"Well, look," she said. "Even people like us can have a nice night once in a while." 

Joshua looked at her. His face was so close to hers on the ground, she could feel his breath. "Like us?"

If she turned her own head, it would be too much. No room between them. Near touching, again. 

So she did it. Her brain always came through with the worst possible choice.

His eyes were such a bright, clear blue, she almost thought she could see them even in the dark. Sometimes when he looked at her like this, with his intense stare, she was nervous. It felt intimidating, like a judgment. This time, up close, it was anything but. It was a pull toward him. 

"Yeah," she said, her throat dry. "Us."

They could have a nice night. They could be together, like this. The pain and blood and death, the memories and nightmares—they could ignore it, for one night.

What she couldn't ignore was the weight of his hand closing over hers then. His thick, hard fingers between her own. The desperate grip that pressed against her palm, and that he lifted her hand in his, and placed it on his stomach. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Of course Joshua did not finish the line from Song of Songs:  
_ I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh_
> 
> This took me just a bit longer to get out than I hoped, but that's life. Back to our regular schedule. Thank you for reading!


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> drug use / experience, set during the Rite of Passage quest

_—2 months ago—_

The air pulsed around Eddy. It was hot and slow. It warped and waved in front of her eyes. The ground wasn't where her feet thought it should be. She tripped and rolled into the loose red dirt. 

A cloud of dust blew up around her, and she could swear she felt every little speck fall on her sweat-soaked skin. A glowing pinprick, like hot snow.

White Bird had not been real forthcoming about what his ritual would be like.

Eddy groped her way along the dry cavern walls and crawled up pebbled hills to the yao guai nest. The sky was sharp and purple, and everything was glazed. Like you'd spilled a sarsaparilla on your eyes and let it dry there, all sticky.

That might have been a livable situation for a brief time, if not for the howling echo of every sound she heard, and the rapid gunshot of her heartbeat. It pounded through her body, so hard she nearly wished it would just stop. 

She found Ghost of She and saw her split into four flaming, spitting devils.

She found the butt of her rifle and it slipped between her wet hands.

She found herself alone in a pile of broken skulls, screaming. 

The fire from the bear's corpse burned on her skin, even while she dragged her herself away, down the dry slope. Her limbs wouldn't follow orders, her tongue was thick in her mouth. 

Past the wind and blood in her ears, she followed the sound of water. Every step, it was harsher and louder, until she sloshed into the Narrows, and all she could hear was the waterfall's deafening, endless crash.

Eddy covered her ears and walked and walked until the sound didn't hurt anymore.

The wet stones beneath her feet gave way to the gray, silty mud at the river bottom. The only ground that didn't fall away under her was a low, sandy bulge at the edge of the water. She planted her boots there, gripped the rock wall behind her tight, and tried to will the world to stop moving. 

And burning, still. That root tea the shaman made was boiling her from the inside. Made her want to take off these filthy clothes she'd been wearing since God knew when and lay her aching body down in the river. 

Let the cool water rush over her, wash away the salt sweat, and the drool, and the hot tears that stung her eyes and fogged her glasses.

But she might rush away with the water, and where would it take her? What kind of dead swamp did the Virgin dump out into when it left the canyon? What kind of mess had it brought from wherever it sprung? Safer to stay in one place, here, and let the river go its own way.

She took off her pack and her rifle. The water rushed up to soak them.

Her shirt buttons were smooth, pearly snaps that slipped between her fingers like the river stones. Each one came apart with a crack that echoed off the rock. The sleeves hung onto her arms when she tugged them down. They seized her wrists until she shook the whole thing loose from her, and let it float, thin and ragged, on the water. 

She dropped to her knees in the mud and reached into the river. Cupped her hands, brought the water over her head. It dripped into her eyes and down her hot cheeks. The cool of it melted away as soon as it hit her hot skin, so she splashed more onto her face, her neck, her hair. 

There wasn't enough room in her lungs to breathe. The frayed collar of her undershirt ripped easy when she pulled at it. She dragged the ratty edge of the shirt up her stomach, ready to lose it to the river, too. Then she saw him. 

Joshua Graham stood in the water before her. Between her fogged and spattered glasses and her shuddering vision, he was a blur again. A ghost. 

The river churned around his legs, a dizzy ring of waves to mark him. His arms held high, his leather-bound scripture in one hand. Eddy had never seen him care whether he was wet or bloody, though he changed those bandages often enough. His book, on the other hand—he kept it safe and clean. 

He spoke. The words came to her over every other sound.

_Come down and sit in the dust, O daughter of Babylon. _   
_Make bare the leg, uncover the thigh, pass over the rivers. _   
_Thy nakedness shall be uncovered._   
_I will take vengeance, and I will not meet thee as a man._

He went on and on. He didn't need the book to read what he came to tell her. It was all in his head already, she knew. 

She stared up at him from the mud, mouth hanging open, while he said his verses. His voice was dark as the words he recited. It soothed her ears from the pain, and it swirled into her stomach. It was low and close and sweet, and she wanted to hear more of it. 

White Bird had said she would see a vision of truth. And here he was. She had to laugh. It was a sad surprise.

Pretty words demanding death and destruction. She was the one to come to for that.

"You're right." Eddy's mouth moved slower than it ought to have. Her words were slurred, and that made her laugh harder. "You're so right," she told him, rising to her feet. 

He trudged to the rock-strewn shore where she stood. She backed against the rock face, still laughing though it was hard to breathe. He came close, closer than he had ever got to her. His boots dug into the mud outside her own, and he looked into her eyes. 

"Datura." It was a scold, but she could hear his flat humor in it. The unfortunate fact was, despite her laughter, she found not one fucking bit of all this funny. "You'll be fine," he said, "in a while."

"How long?" How long could one damned cup of tea last? Her throat burned with thirst, and every word and breath dried her further. She licked her lips and her breath caught, lapping itself in her lungs. 

His eyes searched her face. She tried to follow his gaze, to keep his eyes straight with hers—it eased the spinning, and the pulsing. She could keep watch on the fierce, cold blue there, and the deep etched marks in the mangled skin above his nose. But he roamed over her, and then his hand was on her cheek. 

The dark, burned fingertips were warm and sharp like the dust. His thumb ran over her skin, under the frame of her glasses, and up to her brow bone. It drew up her trembling eyelid. Her eye fluttered, unfocused, and he leaned in, closer, to study her. 

His scent wasn't strong. It wasn't bad. She had to be this close to know. Or the tea had made that potent, too, like everything else. Gun oil, dirty jeans, something dry and smoky like a dead fire, something musty and sweet like an old, wet cactus.

She breathed in deep. It did nothing to settle her shaking hands. Or the strange fucking urge she had to reach for him, to pull his body toward hers. To have someone to hold her through this, no matter who it was. 

Some part of her thought it would feel real good, to have him flush up against her. Some other part of her was doing all the thinking, since her brain was fucked.

That was the reason. She was going crazy. Didn't make a bit of sense, otherwise. But what did these days? What ever had?

He let go of her eyelid. The rough fingertips swept down her face, and moved under her jaw. They pressed into the soft, wet flesh of her neck. Eddy whimpered and sighed when they pushed in further, to find her heartbeat. 

Her blood pulsed into his fingers. It drummed, fitful and wild. Her eyes found his again. They stared at each other, without a blink, without a glance away. She heard, _felt_, his breath, hard but measured against the gauze that covered his face.

At his side, his other hand gripped the leather scripture book and held it tight against his thigh.

Then he lifted his hand away. She swallowed, still feeling the force of his hand against her throat. 

His eyes left hers and lowered. He seemed to watch her swallowing. To watch what felt to her like a desperate rise and fall of her chest, while her lungs tried to keep pace with her heart. 

"The symptoms should ease soon," he said slowly. "Gone in a few hours, by my observations." His voice had deepened, quiet and cracked. He shifted his feet, and the toe of his boot knocked against hers. 

Hours more of it. If she could puke, or pass out, maybe she would live. If Joshua would stay with her like this. 

Eddy couldn't ask that. Her damn mouth wouldn't let her say it. Even if her body asked it of her. Even if, through the haze and pain, she realized she thought of him as Joshua, now. Thought of him as a man, like other men whose touch she had known and liked, whose bodies she wanted to press against hers. 

"Have you ever—" The question caught in her dry throat.

Joshua's eyes flicked up to hers. "Ever what?" he asked, a low whisper.

She coughed, and raised her shoulders from the rock face and leaned forward. They were nearly touching. "Drunk datura tea."

He shook his head, slowly. "New Canaanites don't believe in it."

The question spilled out of her before she could think it back.

"That why the Legion won't take chems? Because of you?"

He didn't look away, but his eyes changed. They hardened and grew cold. She had never mentioned the Legion to him again, after that first time in the cave. Suppose he felt it had been an understanding between them, that she would know better. 

But she never knew better. He was learning that now, she guessed.

After he stared at her for a moment, Joshua answered calmly. "Yes. It was my idea. One of many." 

There was a silence that was filled with more answers. She could hear the truth churning in his mind like the river over the rocks.

Yes, what the Legion became was because of him. In nearly every way. He had been with it from the beginning. He helped to create it. He was its architect, as much as Caesar, whether he wanted to take the credit or not. 

Yes, he had enslaved, and raped, and robbed so many of their lives and homes and dignities. And taught and ordered others to do the same, passed on the grim tradition of his brutality. Yes, he had done all that. 

He was not like other men. 

It would do her good to remember it.

"How could you do it?" she asked.

The man had the worst fucking habit of looking you straight in the eye when you wished he would turn away. It made her feel like whatever she said came straight back to her. Reflected in a broken mirror. His eyes were the blue edge of the glass. Sharp, and deadly.

"You ask the question I ask myself every day," he said. "I only know that I did."

He was drowning in shame, but shameless, because he made no excuses. 

"My past is a wreckage. If anyone could learn from it—" He shook his head and finally looked away, with a heavy sigh. "That life... It was the first black chasm I fell into. I crawled out of that darkness with whatever was left of me. The canyon itself was nothing after that." 

Eddy had never felt sorry for Joshua. Never wanted to feel it. He made that impossible, if she'd been so inclined. He went on living, fueled by love and anger. Love for his people, for God. Anger for anything that would separate him from them, even what he had been before. He looked at his past straight as he looked at her. 

Thing was, she couldn't see what he saw. And he couldn't hear her own truths, black and foaming in the darkest parts of her mind. So deep it would be hard to speak them. 

"You can forgive yourself?" she asked.

He turned back to her and fixed her with an awful look. The question had come out harsher than she'd meant it. She wasn't speaking with sense. She truly wanted to know. To hear if it was a real thing. 

"God forgives," he told her. "I don't."

Joshua took a step backward toward the water. Away from her. The heat that had settled between them faded, and Eddy was left to shiver, feverish and wet, without the weight of him near. 

"I won't forgive myself, and I will not forgive Caesar." He said the name like it bit his tongue. His empty hand, the hand that didn't hold the scripture book, flexed slowly, the wounded fingers curling. If she could have seen his mouth, she guessed he would be snarling like a rabid coyote. 

"My body, my mind, my _soul._" His voice shook. "Everything I promised to God, he took from me."

She believed him. She had seen a little of the wreck Caesar had made of the world. That he and Joshua had made together. "And your humanity," she said through chattering teeth. "That's the important part, I hear."

He scoffed, and it was an ugly, judgmental noise. "Now you do sound like a Follower."

"I come by that honest." Her brittle throat croaked out the words, but she needed him to hear it. 

Something stilled him then. His eyes let go of their hard stare. He didn't fight her. He spoke calm and resolute. "If you judge and find me irredeemable, I understand. But no one among us has not sinned."

Eddy believed that, too. Sin, such as she knew him to mean it, was nothing new to her. Not the everyday fucking and drinking and gambling that set Daniel to anger. No, the acts that end in death and misery. She had been running headlong into those since she was a kid. 

Her heart still beat heavy in her throat, and her head, and with each pulse she could feel a sinful memory: a trigger pull, a stab, a crowbar hit. She had started with the old man, the rancher, who hurt her and the other girls. But she had killed a lot of old men since then. And women. Some were evil. Some were surely innocent, if there was any such thing in this life. 

And what happened to their children when she took their lives? The ones who loved them? What happened to them when she lived, and they didn't? 

If his past was a wreck, her path was a ruin. There was death at every turn. And she made the choice to keep walking, hell or high water. 

She fell back against the rock wall. The rock throbbed against her, in time with her heart, with each slow blink of her eyes. "Whatever you mean by that," she said. "I've done plenty. But not like you."

Joshua stared at her for a moment, then stepped close again. The pointed toe of his snakeskin boot wedged under her foot. 

"No one has sinned like I have. Not even Edward, because he never cared. But he will be judged, in the end." 

He brought his hand to her cheek again. Before, his touch had been hot and insistent. Now it was unsure. Now it felt like he saw her another way she couldn't possibly know. 

"We all will," he said softly. 

Then he pulled back his hand, and his foot, and turned away to walk into the water. He disappeared downriver, into the foam and spray of a waterfall.

Eddy felt around her face and throat, where his hand had been, and the skin was flushed and sweaty. But so were her hands. So were her eyes and her mouth. 

She stooped and crawled to the water, and drank of it until she couldn't. She rolled onto her back and lay herself down where the river met the rocks. The stones cool under her back. The back of her head, and her hair, in the cold stream. 

Judged in the end, he said. She was counting on that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me @ Josh Sawyer: Yeah Psalm 137 is good and all, but how bout that Isaiah 47?
> 
> Thank you for reading. I hope this abrupt shift from "sexy" to "oh shit" was as entertaining for you as it was for me.
> 
> I really appreciate all your comments! They sustain me like water in the desert or, uh, something.


	7. Chapter 7

_—Now—_

Most times, Eddy knew what to do with herself. 

There were easy choices. Stay or go. Ask or tell. Speak or keep quiet. Kill or be killed. Any one of those was the right move on a given day, or it wasn't right, but it didn't matter much. You made a decision, and you went ahead, whatever the consequences were.

Sometimes even being killed you could move on from. Maybe a few people were like that, but it was a hard notion to swallow. She'd never been special. Just a little lucky.

The times, on the other hand, when Eddy had no fucking clue what to do? Stuck like a brahmin on a fencepost, too stupid and scared to move one way or the other? 

She'd make a list. 

Count up in her head everything around her, the things that were real. When the ground dropped out from under you, at least you knew what was still there. What you could see, and feel. 

There was the cliff, and the empty canyon beyond, not so far from her feet. There was the solid rock under her back that went down and down. There was the black opening of the cave mouth behind her. There was a scrub of Mormon tea that rustled in the breeze a few yards away. There was the gun she couldn't let go of, set away against a small, dusty rock. 

There was Joshua. And there was Eddy, with her hand in his. Her breath shaky and shallow. Her palm hot against his own, bandaged and raw. Her fingers curling around his, the back of her hand brushing his worn leather belt, the frayed belt loops at his waist.

She wasn't looking at any of that. She was looking at him, and he stared clear back. 

She swallowed, and used her free hand to push her glasses back up her nose. They'd slipped when she turned to face him. Her eyes had got as used to the night as they were ever going to, and she could see him clear enough. This close, it was easy. 

Joshua's eyes looked less red and sore than they did day to day. Less pained and hard. More soft, like they got with her sometimes. More worried. There was a wrinkle she could make out even in the damaged skin between his brows. A question in his stare. In his grip on her hand.

Eddy couldn't translate it into words. She was no good with languages, not like him. She was half-passable in English, for fuck's sake. But she could guess at what he asked. She was asking it, too. God damn her but she couldn't help it.

Her answer was to lower her hand from her glasses, and land it gentle on his arm between them. A muscle twitched under her palm. She ran her hand over the cool cotton of his shirt, and the rough stitched patterns there, and felt the gauze wrapping underneath. Felt the heat of him through all of it. 

Heard a muffled grunt through the bandages at his mouth, and saw his jaw move beneath them, like a rabbit in a trap, desperate to be free. He watched her all the while. 

Until the jaw moved once more and he tore his eyes away. He let go of her hand and dropped it into the dust. In the same quick motion, he pushed himself up to sit, away from her, and pulled his legs in to lean upon his knee. He sighed, quick and hard, and stared out over the cliff into the dark horizon. 

Eddy was left there, alone. She moved her fingertips back and forth against the dusty plateau. The warmth faded quickly from her hands. Sometimes you made the bad choice. Sometimes your answer was dead wrong. 

Maybe he'd been asking a different question, or no question at all. Maybe he'd been telling her to stop him from gazing into her eyes and holding her hand like some fool. If she'd heard that instead, and done the better thing, she wouldn't be laying down breathing in dust, with her hands in the dirt and her face hot with shame. 

But she was a fool, too. Never more foolish than when he looked at her with that soft stare. 

"Did I hurt you?" 

She asked it to have something to ask. To not have the silence sit so heavy on top of her. She nearly hoped she _had_ hurt him. Otherwise, he didn't want her near anymore. And her wanting that, coming so close to it, giving into it in her own stupid way, only to have it thrown back—it made her feel real fucking weak. 

But he hadn't pulled away like that when she lifted his arm before, to show him the swan. This time, she'd touched him so lightly, and he was a tough bastard. Then again, she didn't know how he felt—how his broken body might react to anything. 

"What?" He said it, his breath heavy, like he had forgot she was even there with him. 

Then he shook his head. "No. I don't injure quite that easily." So he had heard her. It was taking his brain a minute to catch up to his ears. 

She almost wished he hadn't heard. That she could lay there and play dead while he was distracted, until he got bored and left. It worked with deathclaws, sometimes. 

"Of course you don't know that." Joshua's fingers raked along his leg in a slow scratch. "You see what I let anyone else see." 

"My joints don't move the way they should," he explained. "The way they used to. Part of that is from the burning. Part is from the fall, and how my bones reset." From the corner of her eye, on the ground, she saw his back straighten, stiff and slow. 

"Part of it is growing old." He didn't say it with any humor, the way you would when you talked to a friend. He said it like a doctor with a patient. Like Julie Farkas might say it to one of those ancient drunks in Freeside, to keep them from starting fistfights, or throwing themselves down stairs.

That must have been the way he could talk about his body, and his pain. Like it was someone else's. He could talk all day about his soul and its ravages, but to admit such a simple weakness, that you ached and hurt like an old ghoul, when you had to hide it from yourself to get out of bed in the morning—it wasn't easy.

"Some of my skin has never healed at all. The vast majority has, over the years. My body is a ruin of scars, but it is whole, in its way. The bandages... I could remove most of them. I don't want to." He turned his stiff neck to face her. "Is that vanity?"

She rolled onto her back and brushed her dusty hands onto her corduroy pants. "I don't think so," she said flatly, training her eyes on the stars. So she didn't stare at him. 

He cleared his throat. It was a funny, cautious sound coming from him. He'd never been afraid to speak his heart, as he liked to say. "It's only that—" He sighed. "I want no pity. Not from anyone. More urgently, not from you." 

She sat up on her elbows and did look at him then. To be sure who was really there. More feeling was spilling out of him in the past few minutes than she'd heard the whole time she had been in Zion. Had it taken her touching him to do it? 

"I don't pity you," Eddy said, her voice hard. She thought he knew her better than that by now. "Hell, I've got scars. Plenty, if it makes you feel better." 

It was a dumb thing to say, to someone like him. He seemed to like it when she said dumb things, though. She did it often enough. 

Joshua hummed. "I know your scars," he said. 

Whether the sky was paling with the first faint light of morning, or her eyes were trained so hard on him that seeing him was easy now, she didn't know. What she did know was the look he gave her was one she had seen before—in the Narrows, when she was sick from datura and he touched her face. It was a wanting look, but a lonely one, too.

"Your forehead. Your left thigh," he said softly. Her latest bullet hole, and the one she couldn't hide if she tried. 

"Your right shoulder blade. The left side of your stomach." He carefully crossed his legs, and placed his hands in his lap. "The knuckle of the third finger on your right hand. Those are the ones I have seen..." He trailed off, like he wasn't even talking to her.

He listed every wrecked part of her like it was a precious thing. She was seized with something bright and frightening. It gripped her chest and held tight. She sat up then, fully. How could he know so much? How could he care? 

Her breath came shallow. She stared at her own hands. Trying to see that knuckle scar even she didn't know about in the dark. Trying not to let that bright feeling run wild, or give her wild ideas. 

Then she heard him let out a heavy sigh. "Greedy as a wild pig," he muttered.

"Hmm?" His voice pulled her back from her thoughts. 

"My father used to say that." He looked to the sky. "Nothing was ever enough for me. Always hungry after I'd eaten. Always eager to learn more than I was taught. I suppose that was my sin." His head fell and he looked into his lap. "I should have listened."

"The Lord has given me so much," Joshua said, low and hoarse, "despite what has been taken from me. What I gave away. And still I wish for more."

Something real stupid in her wanted to take him into her arms then. With no idea what she'd do once she had him there. She wondered how long it had been since anyone touched him the way she had. Had held him the way she wanted to. Too damn long, she guessed. 

"Well, I disagree with your father," she told him. 

His head spun back to look at her. There was fear there, a scold, like she'd be in trouble. Like no one dared disagree with that man. She wondered about that. How long it took someone to get free from those that brought them into this world. All the pain they left along the way. Not even death could make a clean break. She knew.

"It ain't wrong to want things." She looked at him clear and spoke plain. To him, and whatever of his father was left to listen. "If you didn't _want_ anything, you wouldn't _do_ anything. Just sit and rot in your own piss." 

The fear left his eyes then. And he laughed. It was gravelly, rough as sand, but it was a sweet sound, she had to admit. "That is one way to put it," he said. 

They sat together, quiet, for a time. He was closer to the cliff, cross-legged and straight-backed, half-turned toward her, but his gaze moved restlessly over the plateau, and out into the dark. The horizon was edged with a brightening blue. Morning was coming on. 

She was hunched, one leg out straight, the other bent on the ground. She pulled the cuffs of her shirt over her hands, and flicked a loose bootlace, tapping the peeling leather on her boots. She found her eyes on him once or twice, and looked away before he noticed. 

There was something he said that wouldn't leave her mind.

"What are you wishing for, anyway?" she asked. The bootlace dropped onto the cracked boot tongue. "Or can't you tell me?"

"I don't believe in superstitions," he said calmly.

When she turned to face him, she found him staring at her. That look, again. It sank into her stomach, heavy and hot. 

"I wish we had met in a different world. A different life." 

He said it with all the softness and wanting that haunted every too-long look he'd given her, every touch of his burned hand upon her body, every time he'd helped or given or apologized. 

Those were easier to deal with than words. Words had to be answered with more words. And her words, weak and messy as they always were—they flopped around in her gunshot brain like that bootlace, back and forth. They would never come out right. 

They'd never tell all the vexation, and hunger, and plain _ache_ she felt when he said something like that.

"God damn it, Joshua," was all she could manage.

His eyes narrowed. _"Please,"_ he said, in that commanding, angry voice he hardly ever used with her. That wasn't what he meant. There was no _please_ in it at all.

And what little she did say was still wrong, all wrong. "I'm sorry," she whispered. 

He didn't care about foul language, though he never used it himself. But he wouldn't stand for swearing when it came to his religion. She guessed some part of her did that on purpose. To let him know how bad it really was.

If she couldn't tell him proper, she could ask, though it hurt near as much.

"What do you want with me?" 

There was a cry stuck in her throat—she could hear it when she talked. It was embarrassing. It brought hot tears to her eyes, which was even worse.

She didn't expect him to say anything. Or if he did, to say he didn't know, to be as lost as she was. But he had every command of his own words that she failed to muster up, and he answered her without a pause.

"Everything," he said. "Everything I can't have."

Joshua's gaze didn't falter. He committed to telling her what hurt so badly to hear, and watching her hear it. It was vague, meaningless really—but he threw all he wouldn't say into it. Asked her translate it again, and fail again. 

So what if he wanted what he couldn't have? So fucking what? How did that make him different from any other dirty, sunburned asshole in the wastes? 

Except maybe Eddy. She had almost convinced herself she was past wanting much more than a loaded gun, a cold sarsaparilla, and a hot bath. 

Until she came to Zion. Until she learned that the Burned Man was a real man, a different man. Until with every passing week, every month, the distance and fear between them went away, and the one thing she could understand without translation was that she shivered each time he looked at her and his eyes said _You. It's you._

If she had thought she could call him a friend, that was fading quick as night into morning. He was something more than that. 

And it pissed her off. 

She crossed her legs so fast and angry that a cloud of dust blew up around where she sat. She coughed, and folded her arms tight across her chest. Tried to hold everything in. Looked straight ahead at the blue-tinged black, her mouth shut tight, her breath hard and fast. 

Tried not to notice Joshua inching toward her on the plateau, until they were as close as they had been before. Noticed it anyway.

Her hands curled into fists and her teeth ground against each other. 

"Eddy," he said, with a low sigh. "Tell me what's in your mind."

He had never said her name before. She liked hearing it in his voice, and she hated liking it. 

What was in her mind? Bruises and shrapnel, soaked in cazador venom and whiskey. One small, rare cache of good friends. Bad memories, fears so old they were buried in dust. Desires that got so strong sometimes she shook with the wanting. And anger—at a lot of things, but mostly herself.

_And so fucking what to all that, too,_ she thought. She took a deep breath. The anger left fast as it had come. The wanting stayed. This was how things were. There were two choices now. 

Run, or face it. 

"You wanna know what's in my mind?" she asked, her sarcasm stumbling into something that sounded sweet. Sweet for her, anyway. "I was thinking, maybe we could pretend to be normal fuckin' people for a minute." 

She dropped her hands to her lap and faced him. "Would that be so hard?"

Joshua leaned on one hand beside him in the dirt. After he looked at her for a moment, blinking softly, he asked, "And what would that entail? What do normal fucking people do?"

Everything was so upside down and strange, it was almost natural to hear him curse.

Eddy guessed neither of them really knew what _normal_ was, only that it wasn't them. But she knew what she had imagined so many nights, what thoughts wound their way into her dreams. Her imagination was strong. It got in her way sometimes. Never thought it would be a help.

"You know," she began slowly, unsure how to put it, and her gaze fell toward her boots. Her palms were hot and sweaty all of a sudden. "Talk like we were doing. Be close. Touch each other. Kiss under the stars, maybe," she said, laughing. It was the corniest idea, ridiculous for people like her and Joshua Graham. But that moment, it was what she wanted more than she could ever tell him. 

"Try not to let every damned thing feel like such an agony all the time. For a little while." She smiled at him, or tried to, over the twisting in her gut and the cold shiver that found her again, when she met his eyes.

Joshua sat up straight. He brought a hand to his face, and his fingers curled around the edge of the gauze at his cheek. With a sharp swipe, he drew down the bandages that covered his mouth. 

Even in the poor light of the stars and the not-yet morning, she could see the tangled map of his skin. The broken ridges of burned and badly healed flesh. 

He took her wrist in his hand, and pulled it, gently, close. He pressed her dusty fingers against his mouth. 

After the shock of what he'd done passed, she stroked his lips. His eyes shut tight, and she felt him swallow, felt a shuddering breath escape him. 

The scar tissue was soft under her fingertips, softer than it looked. She moved to touch below his mouth, the exposed parts of his cheek. What was left of his skin was less yielding than her own, but the texture and the heat felt good under her hands. She wanted to touch more. 

"If this," he whispered between her fingers, "wouldn't be agony to you. It would not be for me." 

_No,_ Eddy thought. She brought her hand down to cradle his neck, and leaned forward. _Quite the fucking opposite._

When she pressed her lips to his, and tasted the dry salt of his skin, she whimpered like a coyote, high and wild. He opened his mouth to hers with a deep groan. His hands found her hips, and he pushed himself forward. 

She landed with a soft thud on her back in the dirt. He fell with her, against her. The weight of him settled on top of her. They kissed, hard and urgent, while a lazy breeze blew onto on the plateau, too weak to come between them. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now we're getting somewhere. :)
> 
> Thank you for reading!


	8. Chapter 8

_—1 month ago—_

Eddy didn't carry much around Zion anymore. 

Two guns, extra bullets, a knife, a hat. A canteen for water. A dry summer settled over the canyon. Hiking it was hot and thirsty work.

So this morning, she got an early start. It was dark when she poked Follows-Chalk, snoring on his hide bed, with the toe of her boot. He splashed his face in the river, picked up his headdress, and grumbled behind her as they trailed up the mountain.

She wanted to see the Spine at dawn. They were almost there.

The time before day broke was calm and near silent. They hiked the passages without scouting or sneaking. There was no need. 

The canyon changed after the assault they laid down on the White Legs. Oh, there was plenty of danger, though a different kind—from the sharp-toothed geckos or the mantis nymphs, new hatched and hungry. But the dread was gone. The fear that round every boulder was an ambush. Or that any night they would come to the camps, and lay waste to everything the Sorrows fought to keep whole and alive. 

It only took one day and night soaked in blood to bring peace to the valley. 

One hard, hot day to lay the groundwork, for Joshua to direct the Dead Horses stalkers on their path to war. To let Eddy direct _him,_ pliant and easy as a Gomorrah girl, in how they would fight together. He trusted her, he said. 

One moon-bright, humid night to take their guns up the mountain to the White Legs camps. To hear the cries of the light-bringers, and the cracks of their skulls, when the stalkers brought down their war clubs. To know Joshua was behind her, in body and in spirit, from his low whispers to her, and his dark curses against Caesar's wild dogs.

She was behind him, too, when he near begged her to stop him from beating their chief to death with his pistol. It wasn't what he said. It was his eyes, hard and wet, losing their focus somewhere between what years of making war trained him to do, what revenge had driven into his mind, and what his heart asked for above all. One more time, she directed him.

When you fight next to someone, when it's death for both of you or neither, some things don't need saying out loud. They trusted each other. That was all there was to it. 

Eddy slipped on a patch of loose pebbles, and they slid down the hill behind her in a low, dusty cloud toward Follows-Chalk. The Spine loomed ahead, dark in the early light, pointed with ponderosa pines. 

That fear and dread that left the valley would never leave the Mojave. It was waiting for her, unquiet, picking itself apart. And all she had promised to do for Joshua was done.

The thought came up now and again, that she could pack up and leave—but Zion held onto her. It wouldn't let go. Something drove her each day to keep walking, walk on into the valley, to see every juniper-lined crag and hidden arroyo. It begged her back to camp each night, to sleep peaceful and deep by the fire. To hear Joshua read his stories aloud, his hard voice strangely gentle.

If she spent the rest of her life doing that, maybe some peace would find its way into her beyond a night's rest. Even if it started to feel like staying here was hiding. Like someone might come looking for her, might drag her back to the Mojave. That would be an ugly situation. No good for anybody. 

She'd leave before that happened. But not yet.

As they walked, her old canvas pack sagged, near empty, but her back thanked her for it. She could stand up straight and walk fast. She could stow inside anything she found on her walks that might be useful for the Dead Horses or Sorrows. Or for Daniel, or Joshua. 

Follows-Chalk thanked her, too. He never wanted to be her pack brahmin and told her so. It was good to have him scout with her again. He was a funny kid, full of questions and backtalk. She was going to miss him. 

He was still complaining when they reached the sandy trail up to the Spine. Like Arcade always did, he bitched with nearly every step. She missed _him,_ too. _There_ and _here_ fought for their spot in her heart, but it was a weak fight, no real good hits. She wanted both, the best parts of both, and that couldn't happen.

And what she wanted from Zion, she would never get outside it. The Mojave had death waiting for her. She could feel it reaching. Here, it couldn't touch her. 

So she stayed.

"You missed one." Follows-Chalk stood far behind her on the dusty slope, wiping the sweat from under his headdress. It was already warm, and they'd been walking at a strong pace. He pointed to a pile of pale rocks, and a round, dry shrub that the rocks hid from her when she passed. 

She squinted back into the early dim, the sun still low. Looked like buffaloberry, covered in tiny yellow flowers. "Any fruit?" she called back.

He squatted and pushed aside the silver leaves. "Little ones."

"It'll wait." She turned and jogged further up the hill. Follows-Chalk's tired sigh brought a smile to her face. It made the jog easier.

These days, she picked up a lot of plants on her walks. Waking Cloud taught her which ones were useful, which ones were rare, when they bloomed, where to cut the roots. The Father in the Caves left the first Sorrows children a rotten guidebook, _Medicinal Plants of the Desert and Canyon West._ Moldy and crumbling, it was one of Waking Cloud's treasures. 

She brought back flame mallow for gecko bites, desert paintbrush flowers to make a tea for the women. This morning, she'd already gathered ripe prickly pears and sand verbena. 

If someone told Eddy six months ago that she'd be spending her days picking flowers, her nights listening to scripture, and liking both—well, she'd have thought they'd been shot in the head, too. 

The Spine leveled out after a steep climb. The darkness around the hills faded into paler blue across the horizon, and Eddy found a tall boulder to lean against and face east, waiting for the sun. 

Follows-Chalk crossed his arms and closed his eyes next to her. He didn't care about any one sunrise over the valley. He wanted new sights, ones that cost more than a hard morning's hike. It wasn't hard to understand wanting something more than what life had given you. To move to a different place than life had set you down in. 

"Thanks for gettin' up with me." The air didn't move at all. Eddy could feel the heat rising with the sun, inching slow over the horizon ahead. 

"Eets lah," he mumbled, the bill of the headdress yanked down over his eyes. "You don't like to walk alone." 

She opened her mouth to argue, but swallowed whatever she thought about saying. It was true, she figured. Used to be, she'd walk miles and miles alone, happy. That's what being a courier was, most times. After she got shot and buried, left for dead, being alone wasn't so easy anymore. Having someone else beside her, to break the silence—it helped her remember she was still there. 

Alive. She didn't die on that boot hill. She wasn't dead yet.

She could kill, and she did, no getting around that. But to _be_ killed? Un-fucking-acceptable.

Really though, to get down to it, she hated being told things about herself she didn't already know. Made her itchy. On the inside. 

"Well, I aim to be leaving soon. No more jangly Eddy to babysit." 

Follows-Chalk snickered from under his hat. "Yah, you say so. When?" 

_When_ he had got so comfortable with her he could sass her to her face? She peered into the rising dawn light, and followed the edges of the cliffs glowing sharp as the sun slid up in the sky.

"Can I go when you go?" he asked. It wasn't the first time. 

"Not with me." Part of her wished he could. It would be a long, lonely hike back, passing the steep drops the Happy Trails caravan had come through. Back to the Long 15, the long way round. 

But she wouldn't be responsible for getting him killed. He could do that himself.

He pushed the headdress up and turned to her. "Is Joshua going with you?" 

Eddy felt that funny itch again, and her heart thumped off-rhythm. Right then, the sun rose over the mountaintop and broke into the sky. The light spread onto the Spine, and across her face. This was what she came for, but the bright was blinding. She shaded her eyes. 

"Why would you think that?" The question came out slow and cold, when she'd meant to bark it out. It was almost the way Joshua might have asked it. And he would have, instead of answering direct and clear. 

Follows-Chalk's eyes went wide before he snapped them down to the ground. "Oh. I don't know." 

He did know. Problem was, she didn't. 

She closed her eyes and let the new sun warm her face, breathing in the high, thin air. Like a lizard on a rock, nothing to care about but the heat on her skin.

"Joshua is different now." Follows-Chalk's quiet voice broke into her blank nothing. 

Eddy grunted an agreement. "From what he used to be? Sure fuckin' hope so. You said he was." 

"No, _now_ from _then._ Since the White Legs war," he said. "Since you."

She fought not to make a sound, or open her eyes to give him a hard look. Her lizard brain scrambled to get away, to put out it of her mind. But she knew what he said was true. If it wasn't Joshua who was different, it was her, or it was _everything._ Things had changed. That day in the Narrows was when she noticed it, pushing its way to her through the trembling vision the datura gave her. 

Maybe it changed before that. Could be the moment she woke up in Angel Cave, to the sound of him praying for her, things were never going to be what they had been. She made the choice to trust him, then, for a while. 

The trust never shook. It dug in deeper. She heard his voice in her dreams.

Whatever it was, it wasn't anything that would last beyond the canyon border. She would leave it behind soon. All of it.

She blinked her eyes open. The dawn became the day, the sun rising higher above the clifftops, burning everything clean and new. 

It was good to see a sunrise on purpose once in a while. Not when you were still up on a drunk from the night before, no real clue about the time or where all your money had gone. Not when you were sweating, crouched and hidden from a bunch of freaks who wanted you dead, and all you had to do was wait for a little more light to pick them off one by one. 

This was better. Wanting to see the day come in with its bright, warm light. Making sure you looked it in the face. 

Eddy pushed herself off the tall boulder behind her and hit Follows-Chalk in the arm with a soft fist. "Ready to go?"

He rubbed his eyes and sighed. "Goot. Yes. I can go back to sleep then." He made his way toward the path they had come up without waiting for her. 

But he didn't leave for his bed when he found out she was walking up canyon, to the Narrows, a longer hike by a fair sight. He yawned, but didn't complain, and their trek down the hill again and onto the trails was quiet. He trudged, half-asleep, no questions or sass—and she checked behind her now and then to make sure he hadn't dropped somewhere to nap. 

Soon enough they waded through the river and rounded Caterpillar's Mound, walking the low, misty stream up to the Sorrows camp. She stopped to fill her canteen, and cup her hands to drink straight from the clear water. No rads, no muck. That was a thing to miss, the water and the air clean and simple. 

Eddy was drinking less these days, too. Wasn't only that her whiskey stash was dwindling. Since the end of the fight, there hadn't been as much need. She slept, and if her sleep was sometimes wretched with memory, if she kept the gun like an unlucky charm to ward off anything worse, she could rest here. She didn't need the whiskey to knock her out. The water was good. 

Sometimes she wondered what would happen if she stayed. Back in Vegas they'd think she died. Stupid idiot who could've run the whole show, took a vacation to Utah of all fuck-forsaken places and bought it. Maybe that would be the best end to all this. To disappear, like Joshua had done. It was something to dream about.

The Narrows widened at the camp. The tall brown cliffs curved around the sandy gravel edges of the river, connected by a few of those awful rope bridges. The wider shore where the Sorrows slept under their slatted huts was colored by dry, red-leafed oaks and white sagebrush. 

The Sorrows weren't asleep, not any more than Follows-Chalk was, no matter what he wished. They were stringing fish to dry alongside the huts, and digging xander root from the loose, wet soil at the riverbank. Daniel was on his knees near the water, scraping at a bighorner hide with a sharp rock. 

Joshua was there, too, leaned against a thick log on the ground, reading, as always. 

When they were at the same camp for the night, he would read to her. It had become a ritual between them, without her ever asking him to do it, without him asking if he could. He would sit, stretched out like he was then, and she would sit upright, or lie down, head resting on her hands. He would read from his book, and the sound of his voice was warm and easy like the fire. 

She'd fall asleep like that sometimes. And wake still warm, wrapped in a rough woven blanket. 

Another thing she would miss, if she could be honest with herself. 

Eddy walked onto the shore, and waved a silent hello to the Sorrows women at work near the huts. Follows-Chalk took a seat on a flat stump in the shade, near Joshua, his other favorite. Joshua looked up from his book and met her eyes. He blinked a soft acknowledgment. 

After the fight, after Salt-Upon-Wounds fled with what was left of his White Legs, Joshua had come to her in the river, while she washed the blood from her skin. _Thank you. For staying with me,_ he said. _I could not have done this alone._

She knew what he meant—he would have killed each of them with his own hands, seeing Caesar's face upon every one. He thought he couldn't look past that to see what was real, without her there to guide him. 

His eyes had softened then. They stayed that way, with her. 

"God has granted us another beautiful morning," Daniel called. He set down his stone, wiped his hands on his pants, and looked her over with a stiff smile. "What have you delivered to us today, courier?" 

Daniel had quit fighting her, once she told him straight she and Joshua agreed about the Sorrows staying. At least the tribe was alive, and so was he, and if he wanted to leave, he knew the way better than she did. But he stayed through it all, though he never showed the fight in him Joshua claimed was there. He counseled and prayed with the Sorrows that night, the ones who didn't volunteer, huddled around a fire in Half Mouse Cave. 

That was fine by Eddy. He didn't get in the way.

After, and now, he was kinder. He'd taken an interest in her hikes and her talks with Waking Cloud. The longer she stayed, the more he treated her like a person. With all that happened to the New Canaanites, it wasn't a surprise that any of them were wary. But it scratched at her all the same.

Eddy slung off her pack and set it next to her feet. "Pears and herbs. Better to grab 'em while the sun's low, before they get too hot." Prickly pear fruit was made to survive, and the herbs were tough enough to last in the baked desert soil in the Mojave. Here there was more water, and they were softer, best in the morning. 

She unzipped the pack and lifted them out. The leaves were wilting already. They'd need to be hung up to dry soon.

Daniel nodded. "You've truly learned your way around the canyon. I was nervous to have you here, at first." 

Nervous maybe, but angry is what he had really been—and it was a sin for the New Canaanites to lie, she knew. She wasn't the one to remind him of that. When the herbs were lined up before her on the ground in messy piles, she reached further into the pack for the pear fruits. 

"Waking Cloud was right about you," he said, sitting back on his feet. "Perhaps you needed time to find some peace here." 

Six ripe fruits. She took them to the propped-up table where the Sorrows collected their gathered food. "Could be." She smiled, because it was an idea that had been kicking around her brain a while. The peace would last in Zion, and she could have a little of it, for now.

He laughed then, a loud laugh that he wanted the others to hear. "And a smile, even. Joshua, it's a miracle," he said. "She's finally happy."

If Follows-Chalk's talk made her itchy, Daniel's made her fingers twitch and curl. Like they'd feel better around the cool forestock of her carbine. 

_"Happy_ is the man whom God correcteth." Joshua's voice was light, but there was a hard edge to it. When she looked back at him, his stare was hard, too, and aimed at Daniel. Daniel didn't notice, but she did. 

Daniel grinned at her, mouth half-curved up. His dark beard and hat shadowed his face, but she could see something behind the smile. It felt like when she was a kid. When a man would smile at you, like he knew something you didn't, and he enjoyed you not knowing—but all he knew was what was racing through his own mind. 

The pears rolled across the table. She dragged them back to the middle before they fell.

Eddy saw the way his eyes followed her sometimes, and some of the young Sorrows women. Even Waking Cloud. He was a man, sure, and a young one. Maybe he'd had a girl in the New Canaanites before the White Legs found them. Maybe they were both lucky, and she was still there, far off, wherever they'd holed up. He never talked about himself. That was the problem. 

When you try to hide so much... when you feel like what you want is wrong, you might take it out on the one who kept it from you. She'd seen it happen, over and over. She'd lived it. Their eyes told the truth their words tried to hide. Daniel could be cold, but that was one more way he kept his heart and his soul safe. If he'd got used to her, maybe he didn't want to be so cold any longer. 

Just like she couldn't take Follows-Chalk into the desert for his own sake, she wouldn't let Daniel warm up to her. She didn't want any part of that, and neither did he. Not really. Her reasons were her own. 

She left the herbs on the ground for someone else and slung the pack onto her shoulder. The rifle knocked against her shoulder blade with a crack that echoed into her bones. She kept her eyes down and walked off, into the water, toward the boulder-crowded cavern path to the hills.

The steps she heard behind her, she figured, were Follows-Chalk's. Until they got slow and measured, keeping pace but distance. Waiting and watching where she might go. 

Then she knew it was Joshua. It was how he'd trailed her when they went after the White Legs. It was how he'd followed her back to the Dead Horses camp, when they made it out alive. When he wasn't shaking so hard with rage he could barely walk. She led him back, and gave him space. 

He had a different idea. She barely made it to the shady outcrop, the little camp with two beds, before he cut the gap between them.

Eddy flung off her pack and sat down, hard, legs crossed, on one of the beds. She reached in for the rifle, and her hand brushed against the cold silver pistol, the pearly face with the lady and the moon. It made her so damn mad that she still shivered when she touched it. Her jaw tight, she pushed it into the deepest corner, took out her carbine, and unwrapped it from its blanket case. 

She didn't have a rag or stick to clean the barrel. No oil to keep it from jamming. But she needed something in her hands. So she checked the sights. Wiped the dust off the scope with her shirt. 

Joshua leaned against the boulder beside her and crossed his arms. When she wondered if he would say anything, he did.

"Some of the Dead Horses are wondering if you will stay." 

She scoffed, and blew sand from the ejection port. "Follows-Chalk is wondering when I'll leave." 

"They may ask you to go to Dead Horse Point when they return."

Another long walk. It would take her farther from the Mojave, that's for sure. And that wasn't the plan. "You going with them?" It wouldn't color her choice but, like Follows-Chalk, she wanted to know.

He hummed. "I don't yet know what I will do next. If the New Canaanite settlement needs me, I will join them. If not..." 

Eddy nodded and flipped the hammer spur back and forth. Everybody seemed to be waiting on something. 

"Daniel means well," he told her. 

She pulled back the lever, even though the gun was dry. No cases to spit out. "I know that."

"He is..." From the corner of her eye she saw Joshua drag the toe of his boot through the dirt. "Young. Not wise in the ways of the world."

"Not like you and me, then," she said. 

That brought a quiet, low laugh out of him. It was good to hear him laugh. He'd hardly said anything but greetings and verses since the assault. It had shaken him. That was why she had to lead him—she'd figured that out, if not in the moment, soon enough after. In the hazy moments before sleep, when things seem clearer, when his verses drifted into her thoughts.  
  
"You _are_ young," he said. "To me."

Eddy looked up at him. She didn't know how old Joshua was. The bandages hid what the fire had done to him, whether it took away the years, or aged him so much more. Seemed like a bit of both to her. Even his voice was dark and hoarse from it. But for a broken man, he was strong and agile. His sight was as sharp as his mind. 

And he had said it himself—a fire, a holy one, burned inside him and always would. Sometimes, that was what she thought she saw in his eyes, the flame that kept him going. Sometimes it was another kind, a burning look that wasn't so holy. 

Both of them had seen too much of this world. Didn't matter when or how long they lived now, it had marked them. 

"You ain't dead yet, you know." She tried another smile, but smaller. Softer. 

It was the smile she felt coming on when the wind was down and it wasn't too cold, and she was on the ground, under one of those slat huts, and far off the waterfalls churned, the fire at her feet was warm, and Joshua was reading, so quiet and near it must only be for her. 

If he smiled back—if he _could_ smile—she wouldn't have seen it. He eased across the boulder, and took one step closer to where she sat.

"He is a good man. If the world were set right, he would be a doctor in New Canaan," Joshua said. "Making someone a good husband." 

He said it in that way he spoke sometimes that was so hard to pin to one idea. He sounded hopeful for Daniel, and bitter—like the hope was the honey on the spoon, and the reality of things was the medicine. 

But there was a hint in it, underneath. For her. He never said anything without meaning, and his meaning wasn't to her liking. 

Eddy dropped the gun into her lap and leaned back on her hands. "Hell, you don't think that's what I want, do you? Someone like him to be a husband?"

He was quiet, and his eyes unfocused in the short distance between them. She knew by now that meant he was thinking. He did that—thought about what she said. Didn't rattle off something to shut her up. Most times she liked that. Other times, it made her nervous. 

"I don't know _what_ you want." He sounded far off, though he wasn't two feet away. And he wouldn't have said it at all if he didn't care what she wanted. 

Since the datura, since they spent so many nights close at one camp or another, Joshua was in her thoughts. Not his voice in her dreams, there was that—and eerie as it was, there was a rational fuckin' explanation. But he stayed there when she woke up. When he wasn't even in her sight. 

Follows-Chalk saw straight through her. Kid knew more than he let on. 

What she wanted wasn't any kind of husband. Eddy didn't know what husbands and wives even looked like, outside the holotapes the Followers had in their library. Happy little pre-war families, with four solid walls, and pretty clothes, and more food than they could ever eat. 

She never knew a family like that. Heard some people had fathers, but she didn't know nothing about it. All she had was her mama, and her mama was no good. Not even when she was a kid. Always picking, always resentful and sour. The holotape families were clean and friendly. Mama had been dingy and mean. She was like that until the day she died, alone in the dust.

So Eddy wasn't real clear on what she wanted, much less what she even deserved in this bitch of a life. 

"I hardly know myself," she said, and set down the carbine in the dirt. "What about you?" 

He blinked at her, like he thought questions were for her, and she couldn't throw them back. Then he thought some more, with his hazy look away. Imagining, maybe. Remembering.

"That life passed me by long ago." There was a heavy weight in his eyes when he turned to her, his scarred brow creased. "I am not a whole man any longer." 

The weight was in his voice, too. It sank under whatever idea he must have had about who he should have been, from so many years ago. 

Eddy pulled her knees in close. "Sure somebody in your tribe would welcome a man like you." She left hanging everything she couldn't say. That there were hardly any New Canaanites left. That they would take what they could get. And what kind of man she really thought he was. She wasn't even prepared to tell herself that. 

Joshua stepped away from the boulder, shaking his head. "No."

"They welcomed me back, when I was at my worst," he said. His snakeskin boots cut through the dust while he walked to the other side of the outcrop, his hands behind his back. "They can forgive anything I have done."

If anyone was ever proof that you don't get what you deserve in this life, it was Joshua. For better or worse, he was saved. 

"But they can't understand me." He stopped at the other horner hide bed and looked over at her. "Not even Daniel can." 

She nodded. "Somebody like him couldn't know what I am, either. All the things I've done." _Not like you,_ she thought, before she could rope that thought in and kill it.

The burning look was back. His sharp blue eyes searched hers. He said nothing.

She held his stare until her breath caught, and that itch was in her, deep and unreachable. She picked up the rifle again and swept the dust from the stock, inspecting it carefully for scratches and dents. As though it hadn't been through just as much hell as she had.

Beside her, he eased down onto the other pallet bed with a muted grunt. The grass rustled beneath the hide. He opened a pocket on his flak jacket, took out a pocketknife and a half-stripped piece of oak. The knife flipped open, and the blade glinted in the sun that angled down off the surrounding boulders. 

"I have to confess," he said softly, "I hope you share your smile more often." 

Joshua drew the knife along the seam of the bark and peeled a long strip away. His fingers seemed almost delicate then. Not the hard, thick hands of a man more used to pistols. She'd thought that in the first days, when he replaced the bandages on her thigh, and his hands were practiced and steady—but she hadn't wanted to think it, then. 

He chipped at the oak with light strokes. "After all you've been through, it does my soul good to see you at peace." He glanced at her, quickly, his eyes soft, and went back to his wood. 

Eddy kept quiet. She reached for her pack and dug inside for the ragged box of 45-70s. The loading door clicked open when she pushed in each bullet. The metallic scrape, the brass slide against the inner receiver drowned out Joshua's soft woodcuts. She was thankful for that. But she didn't get up and walk away. No one was stopping her. 

Whatever she found here, it wasn't peace.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Joshua quotes from Job here:
> 
> _Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty_
> 
> In other words, shut it Daniel (I like canon Daniel, but my version can be a real dick sometimes).
> 
> Thank you for reading!


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is explicit.

_—Now—_

Joshua tasted like Zion. 

On his lips, there was the dry, smooth sandstone and pine resin wind. On his tongue, the clear, mineral river, pure and hard. His heat pressed into Eddy like a high desert sun, and his hands grabbed at her the way a cholla might catch on her clothes, or skin. 

Pulling. Reaching. Sharp and desperate.

It wasn't much like her to think all poetic just because a man got on top of her. This was different. The way he made her feel was different. 

Must be she'd heard too many of Joshua's verses. There were some awful pretty ones, ones that made her squirm when she heard them in his voice. 

_My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies._

Eddy's fingers curled into the loose bandages around his neck, around the worn, stippled leather of his belt, the threadbare denim at the seat of his jeans. She gripped at the hard muscle of his shoulders, at his ass. She held him so tight her arms ached, and when he pulled away from her mouth, he couldn't go far. 

The night sky grew lighter, the pale blue before dawn spreading fast across the horizon. It framed Joshua's face, while he stared down at her, blinking. His eyes—they didn't match that light blue the way they should have. They were dark and wide, half-wild. They moved over her like he was memorizing her face. Like he was seeing it for the first time.

Eddy felt that same way. She smiled, and brushed her hand over the back of his head, stroking the way she might have done through his hair, if he had any left under the gauze. 

His own mouth stretched in a stiff grimace. The ridged, scarred skin of his face was tight. It was the best damn smile he could manage. He did that for her.

So this was a thing. After dancing around it for so long, then trampling right on top like a drunk nightkin, all feet and teeth. Here they were.

Joshua pushed himself off her, and sat next to where she lay in the dust. His hand stayed on her thigh, his thick, heavy fingers pressing into her leg. Watching himself touch her.

She had to be careful. Even if his skin was mostly there, like he said, mostly wasn't all. And you'd have to be blind not to see how he hurt, how his joints stuck and ached, however quiet he was about it.

She raised up, and reached for him—but something made her pull back, empty-handed and hesitant, before she touched him. Some worry, even now, that what each of them wanted wasn't the same. That she had fucked up when she kissed him. Or that, no matter how his hand gripped her even now, he didn't want any more than those kisses. 

So she leaned in, and asked, so soft he might not have heard, "That ain't the end of things, is it?" 

His look jumped up to meet hers, surprised by the question. They were a blue-tinged black, the color the sky had been a little while ago. Seemed like everything had changed since then. "No," he said, with a small shake of his head. Then his hand crept further up her thigh, and he angled closer to her. 

"No." His voice was a hot breath against her neck. She gasped when she felt him touch her bare stomach. Both his hands thrust under the hem of her loose, yellowed flannel, beneath her grimy undershirt. They spread across her belly, her hips, over the waist of those filthy corduroys she wore. The weave of the gauze on his palms grazed her skin.

His rough lips brushed her neck while he explored her back. The cool air hit when he hitched up her shirts, his fingers inching over her spine. 

It felt good with all the heat from his body. But _that_ felt even better. The thing she'd imagined, one way or another, since that afternoon in the Narrows. She'd wanted his weight against her, and his mouth on her throat, his voice whimpering and sighing, his raw fingertips tracing lines on her skin. 

Her useless hands could only rub his back, a light touch over all the layers between them. She wondered if he could even feel it through the bandages, the shirt, the flak jacket. She wondered how much he could feel at all, anywhere. If his pain was deep, at the joint and bone, maybe that scarred skin was dull. Numb. 

Either she could hurt him with her touch, or her touch was nothing. Maybe both were true, in different spots. Hell, she wouldn't know unless he told her. She hoped he would. It didn't seem natural to ask.

But he couldn't read her mind. Not then, anyway. The one sound from him was a stuttering groan—right as she felt his mouth open, warm and wet, on her skin. He licked a line up a cord of her tensed throat. She clawed at his back, whining high and sharp.

There was nothing natural about them, or this. And it had been so fucking long, she wasn't sure she remembered how all this went down. When was the last time?

Could've been the curly-haired Followers doctor on that supply run up to Mariposa. He whispered jokes to her as they snuck into the facility. When the mission leader scolded her for laughing too loud, he winked at her. He'd fucked her against the wall while the others slept, his cool hand clamped on her mouth to quiet her, whispering into her ear. 

After daybreak, when everyone else woke, he didn't joke anymore. He acted like nothing happened. Her face burned, as angry as she was embarrassed, because he ignored her while her underwear was still wet with his come. 

Wet as she was now. One of Joshua's hands drifted down her back and bent under her loose waistband. He kneaded the flesh there, and lowered to stroke into the cleft of her ass. She swallowed a guttural moan.

No, that was before the time with the ghoul she ran with for a few weeks down south in Dayglow, years back. A damn good shot, a kind, quiet boy—he smiled at her the way Joshua had done. Or the way he tried to. She aimed to be careful with him, gentle as she could manage, until he took her face in his bony, mottled hands, and promised her he wouldn't break. 

So she pinned his arms down to the sleeping bag beneath him, and rode him hard. His scrawny hips thrust wildly, his ribcage heaving. But he left in the night without a word. Eddy never saw him again. 

Even while Joshua touched her, held her tight and close, the dark thought came to her. It might be like that with him, too. No matter what he said under that star-filled sky, or whatever wants he whispered into her skin. He could go back to normal again in the hot light of the morning, and cover up that stiff attempt at a smile. 

Or she might leave before he could manage it, even if she didn't want to. Before he could hurt her like that, to save his own pride or peace of mind. Now, she kinda understood how that ghoul boy felt. So she had better make the most of things, while she could.

Joshua backed away from her neck. His hot hands slid out from her shirt and pants, and up to her collar. His dark fingertips twisted open the buttons of her shirt, down to her breasts. Down to the edge of the rip in her undershirt, where she'd torn at it in the Narrows, that first day she could admit that she wanted him. He followed the tear with his bent, half-bandaged trigger finger, and dipped into the cool sweat that settled on her sternum. 

Eddy sighed, watching him touch her, how measured he was. Like he thought through every move he made before he made it. That's how he always was, this shouldn't be different. He paused, his hand hovering over one side of her shirt, before he spread the collar wide open. His hot breath and the breeze met on her skin, and she shivered. 

His fingers skimmed along her shoulder, and in, near her collarbone—the constant bruise and numb spot where her carbine recoiled. It had a hard kick, and it kicked every time. He kissed her there. He knew what it was. 

"I can't feel anything there," she whispered. 

His mouth found her ear, and he breathed a soft laugh. "Perhaps you should switch to a pistol."

"No, thank you." She held onto his forearm, tracing light circles with her thumb. 

"You have to lean in," he said, "to soften the blow," and thrust his own shoulder into her, his chest meeting hers again. Her heart beat hard as one of those rifle shots. 

He took her elbow lifted it outward. With his other hand he found her shoulder pocket, and massaged deep into the skin. It hurt, a good kind of hurt, with pleasure at the back of it. "Here. Set the butt here and push into it. Hard." 

He angled back, so he could look into her eyes. "Of course, when all else fails," he said, tilting his head, "strap a pillow across your chest." 

He was kidding with her. There was a flash of something sharp in his eyes, and a twitch in his lips when he spoke. It was so strange, so precious, to see his mouth moving now, when he talked. She thought of all the things he'd said that she wished she could have seen—the way his lip might curl with disgust or snarl with rage. The way his mouth would have opened in surprise, or in fascination, if he had been able.

She bit at her own lip, thinking of his, and how they felt. "That'll look fearsome."

"Wouldn't it, though." He thumbed her collarbones, his gaze falling to her chest again. His breathing was hard and fast—she could hear it, and hear the throbbing hum under it, like each breath barely held back the growl in his throat. 

Joshua opened her shirt as wide as it would go, still buttoned above her waist. The collar stretched tight at her shoulder, and dug sharp into her skin, when he tried to push it down her arm. She panted and didn't move. She could have tossed off the shirt in a second, but why? It gave her a hot satisfaction, deep in her gut, to watch him paw at it in desperation, and fumble with the buttons like a dumb animal. 

He abandoned it for the fly of her corduroys, where he tore at the buttonholes, and looked into her eyes. 

"Take these off. I want to see you as God made you." 

His voice rumbled into her, felt like it echoed off her bones. She weakly pushed his hands away, and bent over to unlace her boots with trembling fingers.

Dawn hadn't broken yet. The sun was low, but it would come on fast. Eddy could see Joshua clearly in the muted blue, as he watched her take off each boot. His hands twitched and reached out, then drew back. His eyes followed every move she made. 

She got onto her knees, and sat back on her heels while she undid the shirt the rest of the way. For all his wild tearing, he hadn't lost any of her buttons. The sleeves slid smoothly down her arms, and the shirt dropped onto the dusty plateau without a sound. 

When she curled her fists around the hem of the undershirt and lifted it, when the night air touched her skin again, she felt like prey. Like a small fuzzy thing, turning its soft belly to the light, to waiting claws. Being with Joshua wasn't deadly, but it felt dangerous. 

And yet she wanted it, wanted it so fucking badly, so she wasn't any kind of prey. They had stalked each other, seemed more like. Followed the trail each of them left for the other one, until the right place and the right time met. Until the stars fell. 

Eddy yanked the torn collar of the undershirt over her head and tossed it toward the cave mouth. Her breasts, her stomach, her hips were all naked to the air. And to him. Joshua rose to his own knees, and this time he did not stop himself from reaching for her. His hands swept up her sides, his bandaged palms brushed under her breasts, over her nipples. One finger circled her belly button. Sharp, breathy moans escaped him. 

All his pretty words were gone. She brought him down to babbling and want. There was power in that, in her. It would be dizzying if she weren't so close to falling off that cliff herself, so god damned close to not being careful anymore, to getting real stupid and messy. 

She stood up, and his hands stayed on her hips, clinging to her from the dirt. His face, his mouth, not five inches from the half-undone fly of her pants. She went to unfasten the middle button, and his touch crept along the waistband. His breath warmed her twisting fingers, while his hands scratched slowly against the corduroy grain, against her throbbing cunt. 

"Fuck," she whispered to the sky.

The loose pants—she'd swiped them from an old comms ranger who'd outgrown them; NCR never threw anything away—slipped from her hips with a push, and pooled at her feet. 

His hands were on her skin in a second. One palmed her calf, squeezing. A coarse fingertip edged under the unraveling elastic at the top of her thigh, curving down to the soaked, dingy cotton between her legs. His sighs slowed and calmed when he reached farther in, and stroked her wet folds. 

Her own breath shook. Her hips jerked toward him on instinct. 

"I was wrong," Joshua said slowly, while his finger explored her. She felt his words, warm and dark, vibrate off her mound. "This _is_ agony." 

Whether he lost his balance or he clawed toward her with purpose, she wasn't sure, but he fell forward fast, his hand slipped out, his mouth and his bandaged nose pressed against her cunt. His mouth opened greedily and he kissed her there, wet and open, licking at her through the cotton. A groan rolled out from deep in his chest, pained and wild. 

Her trembling fingers reached for the hanging gauze at his neck and gripped tight. She needed something to hold on to, something to crush in her fists, to hit or kick or shoot. Something to break up all that fear and pleasure that leapt up inside her like a bighorner buck. She wanted him to stop—but no, she didn't want that at all. Not ever. 

He did, though, after a minute or so that turned her inside out. His weight against her leg, sagging, as though he were already fucked out, he brushed her thigh with his lips. Panting, he mumbled into her skin. "Oh, rapturous agony." 

Pretty words, again. He may have changed, she thought, like Follows-Chalk told her, but there were always gonna be things that were just plain _him_ to the end. And Eddy... even in her most reckless dreams, dreams she'd not even retell to herself or she'd burn with shame—she would not want him to be any other way. 

Joshua plucked at the underwear until they came down from her hips, and stretched them over her thighs. They dropped to her ankles. She took his head in her hands and set him back down to the ground, kneeling, then kicked the clothes off her feet. 

They stared at each other, both of them with heaving chests and pleading eyes. 

She was naked, mostly. She left her glasses on, and her socks. Patched and re-patched surplus greens that had seen better days. It was the coldest part of the night, before the sun rose again. She left herself that little mercy against the wind that was picking up strong on the high plateau. She felt the goosebumps on her ass. 

He must have seen her shiver, because the wounded skin between his eyes wrinkled up, and he stood. "Come here," he said, a soft order, not like the way he told her to follow him up the trail to this dusty slab of rock in the first place. He took her hand in his and drew her up behind him, as he stepped toward the cave at the back of the plateau. 

The dark waited for them there. Eddy stepped lightly in his path, the way she had along the ridge. Following closer now, because he held her close. 

Inside the cave's black shadow, Joshua let go of her hand and bent over. There was a sharp click, and a burst of white light that made her blink. It was a camp lantern. It lit the walls around them, and showed the expanse of the cave. The mouth was wide, and the inside even larger. The dry walls were short and craggy where they stood, but the ceiling sloped up and back, and curved open to a large, cold room. 

With a hand on her back, he ushered her into the room, and brought the lantern. There was a camp near the entrance: a sleeping bag and blankets, a cold campfire, shelves of supplies, a crate of chopped firewood. 

She hugged her arms close and turned to Joshua. His face was lit from below, his scarred, pink skin shining and his eyes still so wide. They were morning sky blue. 

"Is this one of that Father's caves?" she asked. "Haven't been up here before."

He set the lantern between the campfire and the sleeping bag. "These are my things. I told you, I come here to watch the heavens at night, on occasion." His attention drifted back to her, his gaze roaming her naked body. "Sometimes I stay to think and... pray," he said, and his hands closed around her hips, his skin hot even now. 

What was that damn thing that Victor said to her? _Butter my butt and call me a biscuit?_ That's about how she felt then, thinking back on how they'd come up here, and why. "Did you plan all this?" she asked, with a quiet laugh. "Bringing me up to your special place?"

A shy look came over him, and she'd never seen that before. He shook his head no, and kneaded her ribs, softly stroking each bone. "I might have imagined it," he whispered. "Am I imagining this now?"

That bright thing swelled up in her again. It took hold of her heart. She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him. Slow and proper, like she ought to have done the first time. Kissed him like she had wanted to, like she never imagined she would. A short, gentle one, then longer and heavier, then she opened her mouth to his. She sucked his tight, thin bottom lip between her own, and licked along the lines and tracks of the scars at his mouth. 

All the while he stroked her back, until his heavy hands clutched at her and crushed her body into his, and his breath came ragged. He broke her string of kisses and guided her to the cave floor, to the sleeping bag. "Give me a moment," he said, stroking her cheek. "You're cold."

So Eddy lay back on the worn nylon bag, sat up on her elbows, and waited like he asked. She watched him, like she often did—except now, she didn't turn her eyes onto something else in case he noticed, didn't fear being caught by anyone. 

He knelt in front of the cracked and moldy crate, lifted out a few dry pieces of wood, and carried them to the campfire, where he squatted with his back to her. He kindled it from matches or a firestarter, she couldn't see. She could only hear the rush of new flame and see the warm glow spread onto anything that would reflect it. 

Straightening the logs in a neat stack, his movements were careful. His legs were tight and strong, despite everything. So was his ass, she knew that now. He stoked the flame until it rose up, and the light grew, and the heat reached her skin. 

It was crazy to have someone do things for her, like this. Joshua yeah, but anybody. Someone to care for her, to take care of her. She'd never had that. And he'd done it since she showed up in Zion, even after the gunshot healed, after she could walk and fend for herself. He had offered even more than she had taken. She was a stubborn ass, never said otherwise, but he cut through that thick hide of hers with his words, and his ways.

Maybe because it was such a god damned shock to find the Legion's toughest son of a bitch was not what she expected, in all the ways that mattered. Maybe because she found herself someone who understood her even when she couldn't speak her troubles. And someone she could understand—someone she could take care of, when he was hurt and low. Scared, even, like he'd been after Salt-Upon-Wounds.

She'd thought before they had both been marked by their wrongdoing. It was true, you could see it. But there was something else in common between them, she felt now. Their hard hearts had got them this far in life. For some fucking reason, they got soft around each other. 

Now, she wouldn't admit that to anyone else in this world, sucked dry to the bone from war and want. Not even Arcade. But she didn't have to. Joshua knew. 

Who could say what anybody really deserved for what they had done, or what had been done to them? What they were owed, or what they should pay? What you deserved was different from what you needed. 

Need wasn't part of the commerce of good and evil. Need was a fire. It weakened down to the smallest ember, or it raged and burned everything in sight. It could be washed out cold and dead. It could be sparked up again from nothing, all bright heat and fierce light.

Joshua stopped stoking the flame. His shoulders stretched, his back straightened, and he dropped to his knees on the hard cave floor. When he turned back to face her, she saw the look in his eyes change. It shifted from something blank and almost sorrowful, the haunted pain she'd seen in him that first time, to a sharp smolder. The fire was there now—that burning look she could nearly _feel._

Like he forgot she was there, or feared she might have never been there at all, and then she was. She knew what those dreams and thoughts were like. But this _was_ real. She felt the cool air and the campfire's heat, she smelled the damp back of the cave and the woodsmoke. She saw him crawl closer to her, blocking the light of the fire, and unzip his flak jacket. 

When he cocked his knee, brought it down beside her thigh, and straddled over her, she snaked her arms into the dark warmth inside the open vest. Gently, she circled his waist with her hands, tugging at the shirt tucked into his jeans, and he sighed. He sat back on her shins, and shrugged off the vest, pitching it into the cold shadows. 

Eddy pinched at his shirt buttons and one by one, they fell open. Her hands found his solid, hard chest, his stomach, sliding over the gauze—wondering how thick it was, how whole he was beneath it. If he could feel her touch at all. She couldn't tell, because he took both her hands in his, set them down firmly at her sides, and lowered himself down to her again, between her legs.

Joshua's weight pinned her to the sleeping bag, made her breath catch, and he kissed her, slowly. There was no hurry or fear in her now, or him, she figured. The desperate first tastes, when they were starved for each other, were over. They could be idle and easy. 

While he nipped, almost too hard, at her bottom lip, his hand reached for her ankle, pushing down the cuff of her sock. "You did not finish," he said. 

His tone had a shade of the wicked threats she knew he could make. But his mouth twitched again, and that flash of mischief was in his eyes. She laughed, full and open, throwing her head back. 

He kissed down her throat and kept yanking at that damn sock. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eddy remembers another line from Song of Songs.
> 
> Quick note: 
> 
> So if you've been reading up to now, you'll know the structure of this is back and forth, current to flashback. There are two more chapters of explicit content, but of course that means two more chapters of flashback. Just a heads up on that. There won't be any fading to black on the "current" scenes, since they're continuous—more like cross-cutting. 
> 
> Thank you so, so much for reading this. Your comments and kudos are amazing to me. I'm in heaven (or, better yet, Zion).


	10. Chapter 10

_ —2 weeks ago—_

The Virgin swelled after a long summer storm. Water coursed up the Narrows, soaked up the canyon walls, and the falls were painful torrents. For a week, you had to swim to get in or out. Hot as it was, that was no hard task. It was pleasurable to float and bob in the river, and twist your way around, cool and smooth as a snake. 

Only Joshua stayed out, down at the Dead Horse camp most days. Eddy guessed he didn't like to swim. She picked up whatever he might need from the caves up river, but he never needed much. 

She was happy to do it. After a few weeks of walking Zion and poking into every split in the rocks, every hole in every log, she wasn't so restless anymore. She could take it easy, and be. She was a part of things here, in a funny way. Funny to her, anyhow. 

If that meant climbing the mountains with the Dead Horses to herd the bighorners, or stowing beds and weapons in the cavern before the rain, that was fine. If it meant dog paddling up river to Half-Mouse for supplies, and trudging back down the trails while the sun steamed the water off her skin, that was good, too. 

Some days, Eddy didn't even think about the Mojave. 

It was a quiet life. Not as much to eat as there was in Vegas, but that was no bother. What they had was good. It was enough. There were stories from White Bird and hunts with the scouts. There was music, sometimes, because the Sorrows wise women kept a few of their drums from the exodus.

Soon enough the rest of the Sorrows would come back to live in the valley. They would make new camps, Waking Cloud told her, to hold all their people. The little kids would be back. Eddy sort of looked forward to that, if she stayed long enough to see it. 

The Sorrows had a schedule. They followed the seasons and the moons and set out their chores along the list of days. Now was a mending time.

A few of the men gathered up clothes and fishing nets, armor and gauntlets. Things that got damaged in the fighting. Things they snatched from the White Legs' corpses. There were bullet holes, knife slashes. The little nets needed repairs, and big nets needed knitting because the numbers of fish rose with the river. 

Eddy helped. She carried a fat bundle of feather-collared shirts, frayed and knotted nets, and homespun plastic yarn the tribe split from old tarps. Brought them downhill from the cavern to Sorrows Fork, a high-ground spot that made a meeting place for the tribes. Where she could spread out her work on the tables, with a clear view all around her. 

There were a few others there, sitting cross-legged on the sloped shore, in the shade of the rusted camper trailers. Eddy liked the sun full in her face, while she could get it. She picked a table bench facing the open sky, not the hills. The wood was worn smooth and soft by age and water, and she unloaded her arms onto the tabletop.

Downhill was a lone agave. She felt along its smooth face, up to the sharpest, longest spine at the end, and snapped it down. It caught the skin from the back of the leaf and stripped a thick bunch of strands from the face, tough and hairy. You could use that for needle and thread, and split it down the middle to make two. Better to let it dry a while, and she had some dried and ready, in a box under the table. These would do, anyway.

Ripped hide in one hand and needle in the other, she made a few quick stitches before wet steps sounded behind her, walking up the short bank. 

"May I assist?" 

Joshua's question was cool and easy. It flowed up to her like she was on her back in the river, and the current tickled past her ear. It was no surprise he came over for the mending work. He was never one for idle hands. 

She sank the needle into the rough hide cloth and looked back at him over her shoulder. "If you like."

He walked around and swung his leg over the bench opposite, a stiff, sharp movement in dirty jeans and tight bandages. Settled across from her, he tented his hands together on the table. A prayerful gesture, though she never saw him pray that way. "What would you have of me?" 

There was a hide shirt in the pile, tattered with bullet holes. Figured he had experience with that kind of thing. There wasn't a visible tear in his own worn cotton shirt, and yet she knew the Legion assassins had come for him. They didn't always miss. 

She plucked up the shirt and dropped it in front of him, then reached for a dried agave spine. "Have at it," she said, holding the needle out. 

He took it from her hand. His fingertips, dark and damaged, squeezed hers when he grabbed for the needle. The thread slipped against her palm, and into his. 

Something made her breath catch in her chest, and push out hard through her nose, like she had dunked herself under the river. Something made her toes go cold in her boots. She'd touched him before, been touched by him—it couldn't be anything stupid like that. Hell, he'd felt all over her leg when she was shot, swept his hands along her inner thigh, and around. Wasn't a thing to get worked up over. 

Eddy kept her eyes down and made a few crooked stitches in the hide.

Somehow, though, when she thought of those first days now, thought of his rough fingers and hot, bandaged palms on her skin, sliding up her thigh, and between her legs— Well, damn it, most people would feel funny, wouldn't they? It was natural to think—

"Fuck!" Pricked her own goddamn finger not paying attention. The sharp pain swelled to a pulse in her hand, and the blood rose up to a bead. 

Joshua glanced up, wide-eyed, when she cursed. "Sorry," she mumbled, but he shrugged. His gaze lingered on her when she sucked the fingertip in her mouth, before he went back to his mending. She noticed. 

She noticed his careful, slow movements, the way his eyes narrowed each time the needle pushed through, how straight and neat his row of stitches was. He was good at it. She knew it from the ones he'd put in her leg—cleaner than most of the hatchet jobs she'd had in the Wastes. 

She noticed, in the corner of her sight, that his eyes drifted up to look at her now and again. And that each time, his boots slid over the sandy gravel between them, under the table, rolling and crunching the rocks under his feet.

Other than Joshua's fidgeting feet, strange as that was, it was quiet and calm in the valley. Bright sun and thin air, the smell of everything warm and green. The Sorrows were quiet with their own mending. A few Dead Horses scouts sloshed through the water on either side of the fork, their clubs held high. 

She could almost imagine what things had been like before the trouble. Before the White Legs slaughtered New Canaan. Before they brought their terror down south to the valley, to kill anyone who had given quarter or peace to Joshua Graham. 

The longer she stayed in Zion, the more she understood how Caesar was at the heart of all the pain, and death, and anger among the people here. Of course Joshua wanted to save anyone he could from the ruin Caesar made of his people. New Canaan would be alive and well, if not for him. 

And what if he'd never trekked the Long 15 back to his own tribe? Well, anybody could say _what if what if_ until they passed out. 

Fact was, he had them back for a moment, before they were stolen from him. He had survived, again, to see it happen. Eddy was sure Caesar had done that on purpose.

To look at him now, eyes fixed on his delicate work, you couldn't imagine any of what was in his past. Except for the burns. There, you might have a question or two.

He spoke to her at night lately. Low and close, he would sit beside her and read, like always. But sometimes the book drifted down, open, onto his lap, and his stories would fade from the book's into his own.

_Confession_—he didn't say that's what he was doing. She'd heard the word. Knew it would mean something deep to him, probably so deep and powerful that it would scare him if she said it. 

He told her things she never wanted to know. About the women he ordered shackled and whipped, and worse, and how hollow he felt when their eyes got dead and dark. When they no longer showed how much it hurt them. 

About the children they picked out from the villages, sorted the weak from the worthy with their awful tests, and left them to die penned up in the dust, under the desert sun, like sick animals on a forgotten farm.

How he strung up a young soldier who stole food for his slave sister, to make an example of him. And that he remembered this one out of so many like him because the boy, and he was only a boy, cried so hard for his dead mother and his sister, when they killed her, that he threw up on himself. And the vomit dried there, drier every day Joshua walked past to see whether the boy was still alive, until he slumped heavy and lifeless, and joined his family in Heaven.

But that Joshua, the Legate, had stopped believing in Heaven, and the Living God. God was Caesar. Hell was everything in sight, and he was the overseer.

It was easy to forget, if you wanted to, that he was a nightmare. 

Eddy promised herself she wouldn't forget it again. But that promise broke as easy as a ripe agave. When he reminded her, it was less a hard shock than a dull punch to the gut. 

"Moses," he said one evening, while the fire burned at their feet, "willingly fell from slaver to enslaved. From destroying tribes, to delivering the word of God. How could I have done the opposite?" His voice shook.

She couldn't have a good answer, if even he didn't. Her bad answer was what he might not like to hear—that his little New Canaan world had cut him off from all the blood that soaked the desert, so he never got dirty until he left. And that his tribe, and their works, couldn't be half so good, half so pure, as he imagined, if any of that had been inside him already, waiting for a crack in walls.

What she could offer was her own sorry story, all the lying and cheating and sin that followed her clean across the territory and beyond. And murder. There was plenty of that. But some things she kept close, and quiet, staring into the bright fire until the memories choked back down deep.

They were who they were now. For better or worse. It felt like better. Better if they could look each other in the eye, and see each other's hurt and wrongs, with no judgement. With no pity.

Eddy could feel Joshua watching her sew, his own stitches slowing. "It appears you are quite the Tabitha," he said. 

It sounded nice, coming from him. A compliment. But the Tabitha she knew was a mess, who lived in her own head and screwed with everyone around to get her way. Maybe Eddy _was_ a little like her. "You get that station out here?" 

"Station?"

"Tabitha, on the radio," she said, laying her hands in the crumpled shirt on the table. "She's a—" but her explanation seemed pointless when she saw the confusion in his eyes. "Never mind." If he hadn't heard her, he was lucky. She picked up the hide and began again. 

"I mean Tabitha, a woman from Christ's time. We hear of her, briefly, in the Bible." He set down his own work and folded his hands. "She was a woman of good works and charity. Around her had grown a following, the poor and the widows she gave aid. She sewed them clothes, among other things." He nodded to the needle between her fingers. 

"And when she died, she was resurrected. A miracle, they said, wrought by the Lord." He looked out into the sun, squinting as much as the tight skin around his eyes allowed. 

The Lord hadn't brought her out of that grave and made her right. It was Victor, and Doc Mitchell. And Victor wasn't doing the Lord's work, only Mr. House's. 

"That don't sound much like me," she said.

A short huff came out of him, a laugh, or a scold—she wasn't sure. He shook his head, still facing the midday light. "You cannot see yourself clearly. Not the way others see you." 

"I think I know myself better than somebody else would." But even as she words came out, she knew it wasn't true. Follows-Chalk knew better. Joshua did, most of the time. Arcade sure as hell did. It'd be a shorter list of people who _couldn't_ tell her all the shit she didn't want to hear about herself. 

"You have your own group of followers. Even here. And you've done far more good than bad in this world." Joshua turned back to face her, leaning into the table. "People respect you. They are... drawn to you," he said. The words seemed to roll along his tongue. She got the feeling he didn't really mean _they._

Her stomach jumped. And again, when his boots scraped the dirt between them, edging so close to her own.

"Tabitha, huh?" She focused her eyes and hands on making a straight stitch, and ignoring everything else about her body.

"She was called Dorcas, also, in another language." 

"Hmm." Down and up, and down again, before the thread pulled through. "Tabitha sounds nicer." 

"Perhaps," he said, in a tone that clearly meant he didn't agree. "There is a certain beauty to Dorcas. In any case, her value was in her _soul,_ not her name." He went back to the shirt he had been ignoring. 

It was a task to find the spot for the needle to come back up through the hide, to make the stitches straight, without seeing where to push. She poked and poked, and couldn't find it. Because her hand was as jumpy as her stomach. Because there was something she needed to tell him, if she could open her mouth to do it. To confess.

"You know, Eddy's not my given name," she said softly.

Joshua nodded, and wound a knot into the short fiber thread left on his needle. "That does not surprise me." He looked at her with wide, kind eyes, but he didn't ask the natural question—_what is it?_ He spared her that. He would have let her be whatever she wanted. 

She reached under the table for another agave spine and set it down for him. 

So why didn't he change his name? Pretend to be somebody else, _anybody_ else, when he crawled out of the Grand Canyon? Because, she figured, you can't run away from yourself. From who you are and all the bad you've done. If you did, no amount of good works and charity could make a damn bit of difference. 

She swallowed. "It's Teddy. Teddy Bear." 

For a second she thought he might laugh. But he didn't, and she was grateful. "Well," was all he said.   
  
"You'd go by Eddy, too."

He nodded again. 

"It's no kind of name for a person," she said, yanking the last of the agave thread hard through the hide. "Mama told everybody it was after the cholla cactus. Looks soft enough, but you don't want to touch it. She said anytime somebody came near, I'd scream."   
  
Eddy didn't remember any of that. All she could recall were the tumbleweeds and the storms, dirty water and dried gecko and puny, half-rotten corn. The traders who'd bypass the Short Loop on their way to the capital and picked through their sorry piles of junk. And mama, who had her stripping wires, scavving scrap, and crawling through rad waste before she lost her baby teeth. 

She had to be useful, mama said. 

Joshua reached forward, and gently pulled the hide shirt from her white-knuckle grip. He watched her with a careful stare. There was a gap in the bandages at his chin. The sunlight reflected off the shiny, pink scar tissue there. It glinted each time his jaw moved, like he wanted to speak. But he said nothing. 

So she kept going. He should know, anyway. What she'd done.

"Never heard from her after she left me in Oak Creek," Eddy said. "Never got to ask what she did with that fifty dollars she made from selling me off." She tapped the sharp end of the agave spine into the soft wood table, each hit a flat _thump. _

"I went back home once, though." The last time. Eddy left Arcade with the Nightkin at the lodge and struck northwest from Jacobstown, alone. One more piece of unfinished business. _Thump, thump._ "Something about dying like I did, it gave me a different perspective on things, you know? Didn't expect she’d be there.” 

Much less in that same old rusty shack south of 95. Still leaning on that chicken wire fence, watching for traders. Still picking at corn in the dust.

_Thump._

"Was she?" Joshua asked softly.

She steadied her hand and looked up at him. "Not for long."

He straightened, and let the hide shirt loose from his hands, when he realized what she meant. 

She didn't come too close to the shack. Just like mama said. 

But it was shameful, wasn't it? Not to get even near enough to see her take her last breath? To use the sniper rifle. To not even look her in the eyes, and tell her why, and put her down proper with a pistol. Like that slimy fuck had done to Eddy in Goodsprings. 

No, she didn't deserve that much respect. She'd left Eddy without a second look back. Whatever she might been in this life, mama killed all of it in Oak Creek. Made her what she became. They both took the shot and walked away. 

"I ain't proud. But see, there's nothing else you can do. When someone takes everything from you, or what you could have had. You understand," she said. It wasn't a question. 

Joshua blinked, and his chest fell with a sharp breath. "I do."

Eddy knew he would.

She half-expected to wobble and give up when she tried to tell him or, worse, cry. But it wasn't like that at all. She felt easier now, lighter. The sun baked her skin and the breeze brushed her hair and she was living, at this moment, the way she wanted to. No matter what had happened to her, or what she'd done about it.

Maybe that was what confession did for you.

Joshua bent toward her, elbows on the table, his fingers threaded together, his eyes closed. He turned his face up to the sky and sighed. 

Then he looked at her, as deep a stare as any he had ever given her. "She was wrong." 

He didn't explain any further and whatever he truly meant, she didn't care. She liked hearing him say it. His eyes were honest, and tired. She could imagine the dark shadows that would have circled them, if his skin were still whole. 

He dropped his arms down, on each side of her own. "And you're no cholla," he said, that warm voice again that rolled from him into her. She felt it, real as the sun above them. She felt the heat from his hands when he flattened them on the table, and whether he meant to or not, his thumbs grazed the skin below her rolled cuffs. 

"Not if I may come this close to you."

His stare held. He told her once not to waste her life on ghosts. Then, she thought he was wrong, another broken man who thought he knew better than her, who couldn't see that she was just as cracked, that ghosts were all there was ever gonna be for her. 

Now, though. She was alive. And when Joshua touched her, when she felt his voice and searched his eyes, he wasn't a ghost, or a story, anymore. He was alive to her.

It was the both of them, here under the sun, breathing.

She didn't understand it any better than before. Maybe she didn't have to.

She pointed the agave needle at him. Poked it close to his bandaged arm. "You might be pushing your luck," she said with a smile. 

He raised his hands in surrender, and sat back straight. The pink chin twitched. He was laughing. 

Could be he was right, and all the spikes and thorns she'd built up had worn away. Could be she was better at hiding it the older she got. Hiding all of it. 

But she wanted him closer, God help her. 

God help him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Joshua, of course, refers to Tabitha/Dorcas in Acts 9.
> 
> Man, life's hard in the Wastes. It's rare and precious to find someone who understands you, and takes you for what you are, and what you've been. I guess they're both figuring that out now. 
> 
> Thank you for reading! <3


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is explicit.

_—Now—_

  
There was something about the way he touched her. It wasn't the way any other man ever had. Most of their hands had been tough and hard, and Joshua's were, too. Most of them scratched and scraped and dug their fingers in tight, just like him. 

But none of them had ever soothed Eddy's scratches with a wet kiss. Or used their rough hands to stroke calm where they'd been harsh. Joshua did that. If he clutched at her thighs with a grip that near stung, if his teeth bit into her shoulder sharp and urgent, it wasn't what he meant to do. He showed her that each time, when his eyes would meet hers with a question, and his hands, his mouth, would slow and soften. 

Eddy didn't know which she liked better. But she had both, and both were pleasurable. Both made her moan low in her throat, a strangled, clogged thing she would have thought sounded stupid, if she could've thought straight.

It wasn't easy to think, while she snuck her own fingers beneath the split cotton edge of the bandages on his chest, and pressed her greedy tongue to his skin wherever she could—his lips, the smooth pink of his chin, the dark corner where his jaw met his earlobe. She panted, shaky and hot, into his ear. An unsteady beat throbbed between them. Her heart pounding and aching, or his. Hard to tell this close.

They moved in strange rhythms, and their bodies threw shadows onto the cave walls, twisting and black.

Joshua lifted the glasses from her face, and set them down somewhere in the beyond. Suppose she didn't need them for this. They did get in the way, all foggy and sweaty. Her sight blurred, so the cave was warm smudges of gold in the black, and he was stripes of dark and light, until he got close up. Close enough to kiss her again. That close, he was another blur—a dim heat that faded into her, like his body, like his mouth.

His open shirt tented her, and his arms closed her in. 

And then it itched at her. That gun was outside, like her clothes, lying there on the rock. It was nothing she needed, nothing she wanted, but it itched anyway. She could pick them up when all this was over. And there would be an end to it, soon enough. But why in the dry fuck did she have to think that _now? _  
  
Eddy shot it out of her mind, and came back to this. Here. Where his ragged lips traced a winding path across her chest, and his teeth found her nipple. Where his fingers searched through the hair at her cunt—up, then down, and each sweep down one finger would crook into the wet mess of her. 

She could barely reach his waist, and she clawed at his jeans every time she jerked against him, and his hand. The finger went deeper, then another. His palm gripped hard on the bone of her cunt. 

"The thoughts I've had about you." Joshua's voice, hoarse as she'd ever heard, rumbled into her. His breath on her skin, a raspy sigh with every push of his hand. "I've wanted you for so long now."

All she could do was swallow and blink and feel him. 

She knew what he meant. What it was like. How some nights by the fire her hands ached to reach for him, how she wanted to snatch that book from his hands and toss it into the river, drag him by his collar to a dusty corner and touch him like he didn't hurt, like how he was in her dreams, like this, and was _this_ a dream, like he'd asked her before? And if it was she didn't want to wake up, ever, not wake up to sore bones and the awful lonely nothing and that gunshot memory over and over—

Joshua's fingers thrust faster. The heat rushed through her like a flatland wind, forceful and wild.

"Yes," she gasped. She'd become dumb. Nothing to say. A puddle of nonsense and sobs and gulps. 

He leaned forward, his mouth on her neck. "Do you know how long?" he asked into her skin. He dipped into the hollow of her throat with his tongue, and down her chest again. Even the air by the cave fire was cold where he licked her. 

He brought his other hand to her face and cupped her cheek, before he gently pried opened her mouth with his thumb. The tip prodded her teeth, and past them, until she tasted him: dry gauze, dust, bitter skin. She sucked him in with a moan, hungry to have any part of him she could. 

"Do you know how long you've been in my mind, just this way?" 

His knuckles brushed her clit, and she choked. 

"Since you walked out of Angel Cave," he said. "After your leg healed." She grumbled when he pulled his thumb from her mouth, and skimmed across her throat. He drew a wet trail down her body and stopped, squeezing, at her thigh, at the bullet hole he'd healed. 

"I found that I missed you being there in that cot, and I realized why. Because," he said, and they both grunted when he shifted that other thumb to her clit, "fool that I am, I wanted you near me. I wanted to touch you. Hear your voice."

She was all twitching and grasping. The only voice she had now was that coyote whine he brought out of her. It couldn't be what he wanted to hear. Or was it, if he—_oh_—if he'd thought of this the way she had? 

She reached for his hips, but he kept pressing into her, and himself back, stroking her faster. He must have seen the question in her eyes. 

"Yes. All this time." 

The words melted into her brain and she—_fuck._

It came quick and cruel. The empty black pierced with stars and colors like the night. The heart and head throbbed through with blood. And the soft, sudden silence, where she couldn't hear herself cry out for him, but felt it hard in her throat.

The last of it trembled out of her slow, while his weight bore down on her. The patchy grain of his jeans against her legs, the rough nap of his bandages at her stomach. He covered her and pressed her down into the slick nylon sleeping bag damp with her sweat, into the cold cave floor. It was good. He felt good on top of her. It helped her breath slow and kept her heart from bursting. 

Joshua took her face in his hands, held it close to his own. He searched her eyes, once she blinked them open enough to see him, sight fuzzy from all of that, even though he was so near to her. The gauze was loose at his neck, stretched and draping across his throat. The firelight colored him red, red as the rocks all around the cave, lined with cracks and shadows. 

"This is a blessed thing," he whispered. 

"It is?" 

He nodded, the fierce blue eyes never leaving hers. "Two people, together in this way. The Lord brought you here. I knew that from the first." 

Truth was, Eddy couldn't give a fuck whether it was holy, or a sin. She wanted him and she had him, and whether God liked it or didn't wasn't any of her damn business. What mattered was if that notion was a relief to Joshua. After all his sins, if this wasn't on the list? That had to be some kind of blessing. 

"Maybe you're right," she said. Something in him settled at that, sank down further onto her, restful. 

There was a worry in his eyes, though, a wrinkle between them that held tight. All she wanted was to tell him: there was no need for worry, that this was good and it was blessed, like he said. But hearing _don't worry_ didn't sit well with her, and she never took it for any real comfort. So she smiled, and sighed a weak little laugh, and kissed him slow. She breathed into him and pulled him closer. 

Words never were her best weapon. 

They stayed like that for a time, quiet and calm, without any talking. He lay on top of her, between her shaky, cool legs, and she held him close like she'd imagined so many times. And it was better than what her brain could cook up, to have him in her arms lazy and soft, and kiss him when she pleased. To be kissed and held, too. It was easy. And she was happy.

Until his own idle touches made her shiver again, and her mouth go dry. Then the happy turned over into something hungry and wanting, something that wouldn't be quiet. 

She urged him up with a look, and a feeble prod of her hands. They felt so weak pushing on him. Limp. Like they went on strike if they were asked to do anything but hold onto him and feel. 

So she let them do that, when he angled above her and there was room between them for it. She traced the long, lean sides of his frame, and beneath his solid, strong arms. She scratched along the seams in his jeans, hooked her fingers into his belt loops and tugged. But he wouldn't move. He looked at her, and if what was in her own eyes was half as starved and awestruck as what she saw in his, it was a wonder they both didn't combust right there.

She flattened her hands over his hips, and watched him while she kneaded there, gentle, light strokes and pulls at the frayed waistband. His eyes drifted shut for a moment, and the hard breath he let out was a near growl. When her fingers danced inward to his belly, plucking at the twisted, old denim around his fly button, his look changed. The worried wrinkle came back. 

He clutched her hands in his own and brought them to his mouth. Brushed a kiss across her scarred knuckle, her sweaty palm. Then he dropped them and sat back on his knees, like he was praying. But she imagined he didn't make a habit of praying over naked women—straddling their ankles and feeling along their legs so they shook with want, and made them want to spread those legs as wide as it would take to let him do whatever he pleased.

Joshua smiled down at her, or she was nearly sure it was a smile. He picked at the gauze on his trigger finger, and began to unwind it. It coiled like a peel of lemon in one of those fancy drinks you get at the Ultra-Luxe, so bitter and so sweet. He kept unwrapping, his fingers red as the rest of him in the firelight. And his hands, all his skin, when the bandages dropped away, and he ripped off the loose gauze halfway up each arm.

There was so much covering the rest of him. Felt like it would take all night to undo him, if he wanted that. Eddy did. She wanted to see him same as her, scars and skin and everything that he was. Nothing to hide behind.

But not if it hurt him to take off more. It wasn't worth that.

The ridges and troughs on his face were the same on his arms and hands. The damaged skin was like a landscape. She felt along each arm, and he sighed. There were sunken spots that rooted deep into his skin. There were raised patches, craggy as the mountainside. But soft, all soft, softer than she ever imagined. 

Once she thought he must be hard all over, like the burning made a shell around him, a new, tough hide nothing could get through. Maybe that's what the bandages were really for, after so many years—not vanity, but protection. To hide how soft he really was. 

His palms inched over her squirming legs, around her thighs. It felt like— like nothing she knew of. Patchy, ruined, but almost delicate, if anything about him could be. Not raw like his fingertips, or the mangled, bent nails. It seemed like he never let them heal, because he never stopped using his hands. Never stopped working, or fighting. 

There was a flash in her mind—Joshua burned and broken, waiting at the bottom of that canyon, crawling for home. For his life. It made her hurt to think of it. He shouldn't be alive at all. It didn't make sense. But here he was. 

Indestructible. Blessed. Hers.

"I haven't touched anything with my bare hands in ages," he said, his breath heavy. "What a gift it is that you would suffer my touch." 

Eddy laughed, but it came out a jittery huff. "Suffer? Ah no, no."

"You know what I mean." He swept his hand along her inner thigh, and ground his palm against her wet folds. _Agony,_ she thought, biting her lip, _that's it all right._ He panted, mouth open, each breath a deep sigh. She could see his tongue, and remembered the taste of him. It made her own mouth dry.

She was never one to lay down and let somebody else do all the work. 

His eyes went wide when she sat up, wrestled out from under his legs and knelt splay-legged in front of him. One of her knees edged off the sleeping bag and the cold, sharp cave floor bit into her skin. She didn't care. Her fingers dug into his chest, dragged down his ribs.

"Let me touch you. Please." She'd never begged for anything her whole fucking life. If this was the only time she did, she could live with it.

Joshua didn't answer, his head down, eyes on her hands. But when they fell to his fly again, and she wrenched open the button with a low grunt, he tensed, stiff and straight. She couldn't hear him breathing anymore. 

She'd spooked him. Like a wary brahmin bound to be roped. There were times, and there were other men, where a thing like that would have chased her off, too. Probably she'd have shrunk back and felt small. Felt like he didn't want her. 

_This_ time, and this man, it was easier to— _compartmentalize,_ Boone said to her once. To look at that small feeling, and put it aside. Because she needed to think past herself, even if it didn't come natural. Because she needed him to be good.

With a careful sigh, she let go of his pants and leaned closer. Her hands floated over his belly, and she nuzzled his ear. "Do you want me to?" 

The warmth and weight of his hand pressed into her back. "Yes," he breathed. It was a hesitant _yes,_ almost a question. She had to be careful, and slow. She knew that.

A gentle kiss on his cheek, and she went back to it. The zipper pull was cool to the touch. She pinched and guided it through the stubborn teeth, then pushed open the worn, dusty denim. 

Joshua didn't move. Not when her fingers stroked the bottom edge of the bandages, there below his waist. Not when she nudged lower, and mapped the tender scars along his upper thigh. 

He did, though, when she snaked her hand below the band of his underwear, and followed the same tangle of hairless, scarred skin to his cock. His head hung down again, fell to her shoulder. She heard the grind of his jaw, the click of his teeth against each other. 

With the lightest trigger touch she could manage, she felt down the length of him. Soft. Skin tangled and hot and pulsing with his heartbeat and all _there,_ far as she could tell, the worst of her imaginings not come true and thank fuck. But soft, entirely. 

She swallowed, half dry with nerves, half starved to touch so little and want so much more, and reset her mind to him. 

"You ok?" she whispered. "Not hurting you?"

He let out a sharp sigh into her neck. "I can't," he said. 

Eddy lifted her hand away and set it gentle on his thigh. "Can't?" _Can't what, can't do this? Can't with me?_

The gauze grazed her skin when he shook his head. "Never since I fell. Not that I had reason. But I hoped until this moment—" 

Then he raised his head and looked into her eyes. "I told you once. I am not a whole man anymore."

The quiet broke with the rumbles and cracks of the fire. They echoed off the rock walls. Every log snap shuddered. 

Once she wished he wouldn't stare like he did, that he'd turn away like polite people do, or—since she didn't know any—she heard they did. Now, like so many things about him, she was glad of it. She wanted to see every brief passing feeling in his eyes, anything the firelight showed in the trembling blue.

Joshua was defiant, and shamed. It wasn't a dare or a challenge to her, his hard stare. It was honesty. But he was fearful, so fearful. 

He asked earlier, when they found the plateau, and she set aside that damned gun, if she was still afraid. She had never once asked him that same question, though she'd seen it in him—in the worst times, when they were up against it in battle, when there was blood and pain and reckoning. 

When it was the two of them, though? Eddy always thought he was in control. Taking her down a path he knew, like the trail up to this rock, to this cave. 

She was a fool, like always. He didn't know the way they were going any more than she did. What she did know was that when he was lowest, she would ease what ailed him. Like he had done for her. 

The longer it went without her saying anything to him, the more worried his look. Finally, he said in a low flat voice, "If you don't want—"

She kissed him quiet. "Hush," she whispered against his lips. "I want you. Just like you are." 

It was the truth. It couldn't have mattered less to her. There was more to them, to this, than plain fucking. 

His eyes closed then. His mouth opened to hers. She imagined he was thinking like she had been before. _But that is what I wanted to hear. How can such a thing be?_ Or maybe he trusted in her and all she was, in how she'd come to him, alone from the wilderness—brought here, he said, by God. 

From the way he held tight to her, and the slow moan that built from deep inside him, he must have taken her at her word.

It wouldn't do to let him talk and talk about it. He would, if he had the chance. And there were, at rare times, better ways to get the point across. So she nipped and licked across the tight skin at his mouth, suckled at his bottom lip. Felt his covered ribcage and the spare softness at his hips, down to his ass with clawing, eager fingers. The wet sounds of her kisses, her encouraging moans drowned out even the fire. 

His hand on her back squeezed and pulled her skin tight. It burned and twisted, too hard a grip. And still she groaned and rocked toward him, said _yes, that, more_ with her body. 

Whatever he could give her, she wanted it. Whatever he wanted from her, she was primed to let him have it.

She spread her knees wider. Though she was sweating from the steady fire, from the fever and want in her, the cave air was cold and sharp between her legs. Holding him, she inched forward, ready to swing a leg over, and push him down to the ground. But his hands hardened on her hips. He broke from her mouth, panting, jaw set tight. 

"Lie down." 

She didn't. See, that was the fucking thing about orders. Even if something good might come of it, something she might like, Eddy wanted to fight on principle. Always had. 

"Why?" she asked with a grin, and sat up straighter. 

_"Why?"_ Joshua circled his warm, bare hands over the wide slopes of her hips. "I do believe it would be easier to show you. Trust me." 

Well, trusting him was simple now. And she hoped he had trust in her the same way. But this was less to do with trust than with plain give and take. 

He wanted to do more for her. Maybe because he couldn't do the thing he thought he should. Maybe he wasn't ready to take yet. No matter—she would find a way to please him in time.

Besides, it wasn't so awful to have the man you wanted gaze at you, his eyes all hungry and hazy. To lay back into the shadows, and let the firelight show him: back on his heels, hard knees wide, scarred skin and lines of muscle tight in his neck and arms, shirt undone and loose on his shoulders, jeans unzipped and open down to his cock, and the crooked, stiff smile on his face while he watched her watching him. 

To hear him laugh, low and knowing and satisfied, because she swallowed hard just to look at him like that, because her legs opened to him before he even moved. 

To have him crawl to her over the rock floor, to grab her by the backs of her thighs and haul her closer, to lower himself to her without ever looking away.

Oh, stars above, if it was worse to let him lick at her until she shook and squealed, to let him dart his tongue inside her twisting, to feel him hum with delight and groan with need while he sucked at her, while he tasted her everywhere, places no one else had ever touched—she would take worse. Better could wait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoy! Thank you so much for reading. I am quite excited to write the rest of this story...
> 
> [I made a little playlist, just for fun.](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0M9ZjLEkRhjo9hCvDoG9RL?si=tT2_yqNIQ-G2g-9OTyEVMw)
> 
> But I'll be honest, when I'm writing I only listen to this ["ambient desert music"](https://youtu.be/svdbNil4fAI)—and now I hear it in my sleep.


	12. Chapter 12

_—1 week ago—_

  
There was a little island in the Virgin near the old bridge. A heap of hard sand and smooth, gray pebbles, but it was tall enough to stand above the water, most of the time. Dry enough, stable enough. You could stand on it, right at the top, and get a nice long look at the valley in at least three directions. 

You could stand alone, while the river flowed on and the warm wind blew past, and feel like even the things that were going were staying. They'd come back around, everything in the canyon would come back—the oaks would leaf again in the spring, and the people would return to their homes here. The same wind would meet you again. The same water.

Eddy imagined that's what Joshua might be thinking, alone on that sandy hill. His eye on everything surrounding them, like he was responsible for keeping it all there, and safe. Like he kept a close watch on Zion, so God didn't have to.

She was downriver, staring at his back from the shallows. The water finally drew down from its summer high, and it washed up her ankles, missed the boot cuffs. Hardly mattered—she was used to wet feet. She cleaned her glasses on a dry corner of her shirt and tightened the strap on her pack before she cut through the water slow, and edged up to the island behind him. 

It was rare indeed for anybody to get the jump on Joshua. She didn't think this morning would be one of those times. Ears covered like they were, he still heard every footfall and bullet load around him clear and sharp, like he hadn't been shooting pistols since he was a kid. Hadn't had the bright ring and black echo pound in his head when there wasn't even a gun in sight, the way Eddy had. 

There wasn't any forgetting she'd been shot in the head. Her body wouldn't let her. 

So maybe she'd walked softer before that. Less brittle and janky, not so much like an old protectron left out in the rain. Maybe once she'd been better at making herself quiet, unseen, unheard, unnoticed. There were times she had to, or suffer for it. 

What was the point in hiding now? Even strangers knew her now, in Vegas, in the Mojave. If anybody had a problem with her, it wasn't a hard problem to solve. 

And here, in Zion... Well, there wasn't a thing to hide from anymore.

He straightened when she got closer. Folded his arms over the flak jacket, sharp elbows wide. She could just about see his eyes narrow from behind.

Her boots sank into the soggy sand at the hill's edge. There was hardly room for two people to be on the thing at once. 

For all he must have heard her feet splashing, he did her the kindness of acting surprised when she came up to his side. He looked her over and blinked, like a cat saying hello. Sometimes his blinks seemed real meaningful, but it was all of his face she could even see. Probably they didn't mean a thing. 

"Hello," she said. It wasn't what she was thinking. More like, _What goes on in that head of yours?_ Which ain't no kind of greeting.

"It's good to see you this morning." He moved to make room for her, his arms held tight, and stared out across the water. "You didn't sleep at the Sorrows camp last night." 

Something twisted in her when he said that. She drew a crooked line in the sand with her wet boot toe. "Nope." 

Oh, she'd been about to head that way, out of habit now. But it wasn't easy anymore. Much as she liked spending the night closed in by the rock walls, with the fires high and steady, and Joshua there to read her to sleep, always there beside her until the warm dark took her— 

It wasn't the comfort it used to be. Eddy had thoughts she'd rather not be thinking. She had urges. She was afraid, sometimes, of what she might say out loud that needed to stay in her head. That she would start talking in her sleep. 

Last night, all it took was thinking back to how Joshua touched her from across that picnic table at Sorrows Fork. The way the rough tips of his thumbs scratched feathery little lines into her dry skin. Imagining that if such a light touch could be so forceful, then what was he holding back? 

And that if they'd been alone—or, fuck it, in front of everyone—he might not be so restrained, and he'd reach across that table and pull her forward by her old faded shirt collar across the weathered wood and kiss her with whatever he had under those bandages. 

She'd given up trying to stop herself from daydreaming that kind of shit. She'd even quit feeling bad about it. It was a stupid fantasy. It was okay to have in your head, if you kept it there. In sleep, in dreams, though—maybe something would slip. 

Arcade told her she whimpered and mumbled at night. That once, dead asleep beside him, she grabbed his coat lapels, shook him hard, and said, _There ain't enough eggs to make that many omelets, you dumb fuck. _

Yeah, that was crazy dream talk. But what if she said something real? What if she spoke her heart?

"I was digging around in the fishing lodge." She shoved her hands deep inside the loose pockets of her corduroys. "Got late so I hit the couch in there." 

"Hmm." It was a short grunt, something curious in him, and suspicious. "Well, so long as you were safe." 

She laughed. "What's gonna get me? Everywhere's safe here now. It's outside you have to worry about." 

When he turned to her, his scarred brow was tense, his eyes dark and doubtful. "Yes. You're right about that." 

Shit. She looked out into the bright sky, colorless with pale morning sunlight. 

There were reasons he'd be worried now. It wasn't something she meant to joke about. _Outside_ was where Follows-Chalk was. He'd gone his own way, after her urging, and Joshua's permission. And she'd wanted to tell him he didn't need permission from nobody, but he longed for it. If Joshua said it was fine, it was, because Joshua knew _outside. _

Fucking thing was, Joshua knew he couldn't keep him here, but that didn't mean he thought it was fine. If Follows-Chalk had known the truth—well, who knew, maybe he'd have quit the whole business. Or maybe it would have itched at him forever, not knowing what he could have seen. Itched so hard and long he got bitter over it. Got mean. 

Better to let him learn on his own. 

Joshua worried about her, too. He wasn't hiding it. Recent days, she'd started prepping to go back. Started to gather up supplies for the trip, patched holes in her pack, checked Daniel's map to learn the route. It would be soon. They both knew. 

The other night, the evening was so hot, and the air was still. She wiped the sweat from her neck with a ratty handkerchief, and slunk back from the fire, into the shadow of the Sorrows’ shelters. Joshua watched her.

_I wonder if you would like to see Zion in winter,_ he said.

He was asking her to stay. She didn't answer. 

Now, Eddy felt Joshua’s eyes on her again. Sometimes he studied her, staring without end until her face burned. He didn’t make any damn apologies about it, either. Stupid thing was, she wouldn’t tell him to stop.

If he wanted to look, he could look. And she’d remember how it felt, every cold night alone on the Long 15 headed back to Vegas.

Hell, he had every reason to be fearful for Follows-Chalk out there. Both of them did. Eddy, though? She shouldn't need to remind him she could handle herself. But it was part of a piece, wasn't it? 

Joshua would have kept them all here. Kept his eye on them like he did the canyon. Safe, to him, because he knew where they were. But he couldn't control Follows-Chalk, or her. He knew that. She heard it underneath what he said about winter—there was no fight or demand in it. There was a hope, quiet and humble. 

Some of the fight had left Joshua Graham now. After the White Legs were beaten. After Salt-Upon-Wounds. His guns had been put away for a while. And that made Eddy worry herself.

When she wasn't here any longer, if those Legion assassins trailed in here after his head, with their sawblades and spears—would he still fight for himself? Would he win? If he didn't—

"What were you looking for in the fishing lodge?" Joshua asked. 

Eddy snuck a look at him without turning. His head angled a little toward her, but the rest of him stood solid and straight. Hard legs that walked thousands of miles. Arms that crawled and climbed out of the depths. Hands raw and strong, that could heal as well as they could kill. 

She pulled back her foot and kicked a round white stone. It skidded and spun over the sand, plunked into the shallow river, and vanished under the water. Of course he would win. He didn't need her to fight his battles. She didn't need him to keep her safe. 

But they both needed something from the other. Whatever it was. That's what worried at her the most.

She sighed. "Nothin' in particular." 

He hummed again. "Did you happen to see any pistol primer there?" 

"Don't think so. Need some?"

"Always," he said. He uncrossed his arms and shielded his eyes against the sun, searching northward over the hill ahead. "Walk with me to the Aerie. We may find it there." 

Then he stepped off the mound of wet sand toward the shore, those hard legs cowboy bowed, his boots slicing through the water like a fish. 

Son of a bitch never learned to ask for anything proper. He ordered and commanded, some part of him still a general who got what he wanted, without questions. Sure, he'd changed, but not so much as she thought. Only the parts that made a difference. 

So she followed him, sloshing onto the bank and scrambling up the trail, but not because he told her to. Because she'd hiked out from the lodge knowing she'd run into him sooner or later. When it was sooner, and she spotted him standing in the middle of the river like a warning, like a guide, that bright nervous want spread through her. From her chest, out to her arms, something in her blood that surged fast and hot. 

It lived inside her now, that want. It picked all her locks and squatted there in her heart, and it wasn't afraid of her, no matter how much she cursed and threatened. 

On the trail, Joshua slowed his sure steps and waited for her next to an old pancake cactus. It bore new paddles, thick and green, swollen with summer rain that couldn't reach the scarred, dry skin at its joints. It had suffered a long time but survived, and if it wasn't the prettiest cactus in the canyon, it was alive, damn it. _They're a matched pair,_ she thought. 

He walked on when she reached it, and picked up his pace. She jogged up beside him to keep up. "Typically, I would send Follows-Chalk on an errand like this," he said, dust swirling up around them from both their boots. "But you've sent him on his way." His voice was light—he was teasing, but there was a bite in it. 

"Don't blame me. You gave him your blessing." She took a long step over a crack in the hillside, where datura sprang up. 

"On your recommendation."

Eddy sighed and fanned the dust from her face. "He listens to you. You know, if you miss him so much already, you shouldn't have let him go, huh?" 

When he stopped and turned to her, she heard a cut-off grunt, like he was about to speak. Then, nothing. He looked away and kept walking. She swore it was the first time she'd ever shut him up. Probably it'd be the last time.

But something in her didn't like to tease him. Not about that. Joshua did miss him. So did she. Like she missed her friends, and feared for them and wondered about them. Like she already felt that ache for everything here, and she hadn't even left yet.

Oh, she'd gone so soft. Life was easier when she didn't know a damn soul, and all she did was work and walk and get paid and get drunk. Not a better life. Easier. 

"Anyway," she said, "you don't send him on these treks. You send me. What're you gonna do when I'm gone?" 

He glanced at her, quick and sharp, and cut his eyes back to the trail. "God only knows," he said softly.

She swallowed hard, and tasted dust. Felt like everything she said was coming out wrong, all blunt and stupid. She should've stayed in the fishing lodge a while longer. Slept the day off under that shellacked, hung fish that teetered off the wall. Played checkers against herself. Dreamed up a better conversation with Joshua than this. 

They walked on, side by side up the wide, dry trail to the top of the hill. The Aerie and its tower came into view where the trail plateaued, the pockmarked antenna stuck tight against the wind, the battered wood stair a little less solid on its stilts. The stair creaked and complained when they put their weight down on it, but it stayed put. 

Joshua came up close behind her. He motioned for her to go in first, and shut the crooked door behind them with a quiet click of the handle. 

Inside, the musty air wasn't much cut by whatever got through the broken windows. The floor was strewn with chipped coffee cups and turned over ammo crates. Mostly, it was empty and hot. Eddy poked in once or twice before, with Follows-Chalk in tow, but something about the wind whistling through that cracked glass unsettled her. It was a lonely place. 

They picked through the rubble and searched drawers in silence. She found a crushed, but whole, cowboy hat hidden behind a file cabinet, and a box of shotgun shells in a desk. The hat she stuffed into her pack.

On the other side of the building, there was another door, and outside it a rusty iron-grate balcony that bordered the whole of the station. She stepped out, and the metal clanged beneath her feet. Like it might sound if you shot up at that antenna. Bang, echo, echo.

She leaned against the railing. It shuddered under her elbows while she stared out into the canyon. The day was clear and blue now, the heat poured down over everything. Sandy hills shimmered in the distance.

The bang and echo rang out again and Joshua's steps vibrated in her own feet. 

Eddy held out the box of shells. "Best I could find." 

He took them from her without a word. Only a narrow stare that somehow felt like it went past her, to another face, or another time.

"About Follows-Chalk," he began, turning over the box in his hands. "I don't have the perspective you do when it comes to the Mojave, and beyond. It's not a world I know any longer. If I ever did.

I do know the Legion is still a threat. All I could do is warn him to be careful, but..." He sighed, and the box of shells seemed to grow heavy in his hands. "They target tribal people."

He was right, of course. She'd given Follows-Chalk an old shirt, a worn out pair of jeans. They'd found boots in one of the other ranger stations, and he took some socks from her. Stuff to make him look like your average wastelander. She'd told him she hated he had to do it, but he shrugged. _I'll always be a Dead Horse,_ he said, the tattooed lines on his face wrinkling when he smiled at her, _even with your pants on._

"He's a smart kid." Eddy ran a fingernail through the flaky rust on the railing. It chipped red and fell away. There was no point telling Joshua he shouldn't worry. It would be a lie, anyway. "He wants to see what's out there, and why not?" 

Joshua looked at her, uncertain. 

She turned back to the canyon, shaking her head. "There’s so much of the world and none of us know it all. There’s people in pockets not seen a new soul in 200 years or more. Ain’t that worth something? It is to him." 

The balcony trembled when he bent, stiff and slow, to put the shells down. Then he joined her at the railing. His shoulders shook with a silent laugh. 

"You may not like the way this sounds," he said, his hands curled lightly around the iron, "but you remind me of Edward sometimes." 

"Of _Caesar?"_ Well, fuck, he sure was right. She didn't like that one god damned bit.

"Edward. He was a different man, then." And he had that look in his eyes again that went past her and now and everything around them. She could see it even when he stared into the distance. "Smart, funny, captivating. Everyone wanted to be around him. Even if he could be... unkind, at times." 

He turned to her, seemed to see her now. "That's not like you, of course," he said. Another tease, with less bite this time. More like he dared her to disagree, and let him know she was just as rotten. Because he didn't think so. If he didn't think that by now, with all he knew about her—hell, she guessed he never would. 

And that brought the ache back to her chest, flashing bright as a gunshot in the dark.

"He said he wanted to see every bit of the world he could." Joshua leaned forward and gripped the iron, testing the railing. "But he never really looked beyond the Grand Canyon, and what he made of the Blackfoots. Never saw the people there for who they were. His mind was clouded by what he could get out of them." 

Eddy had never heard him talk about Caesar, or the Legion, with any other voice except one that trembled with rage and regret. Now here he was, calm as you please, speaking of that life like it was past. The way it should be. Something had changed in him, but maybe it wasn't the fight for himself that left. Maybe it was the fight against what he had been. 

If she had a hand in it, if the way she had come to accept him now, and the monster he was before, put him at ease? Like the way he took her in with all her fear and anger and never asked for anything but trust? That was a gift. Nobody else could ever wrap their head around what had passed between them. She could barely hold onto it herself. It was a thing well outside of wanting and loneliness. Holy, he might call it. 

She didn't know about that, but it sounded good.

Joshua gave a short, resigned sigh. "I suppose the tempering light of God's love never pierced through all that ego. And his heart truly was black."

"Not like you," she said, throwing his tease back at him with a sidelong smile.

"No. Only charred at the edges." 

The laugh busted out of her before she could rope it back. And thank fuck he met her eyes then, and his own were sharp and mischievous, and she could see the laughing twitch in his chin. 

Couldn't believe it took him all these months to learn to make a joke.

She watched him, his broad back bent forward while he searched the hills, his raw, scarred fingers tapping the rust-bloom along the iron bar in his hands, an easy rhythm. Whenever she thought of it, she couldn't picture him in the Legion—in those red skirts and jumbled-up leathers, in those raggedy tents under their bloody banners. Barking orders to a faceless, voiceless troop of men all frightful or crazy. Or both. 

Now it made some sense why she couldn't. He was a different man then, too. 

"He won't let anybody speak your name," she said.

Joshua nodded slow. "Good." His hands tightened around the rail. "Let me be forgotten. Let him do what I could not."

For a quiet minute, she bit at her patchy, dry lips, and repeated the last bit over in her mind. "What do you mean by that?" she finally had to ask.

And then his stare was the one she'd seen so many times, the one she'd come to crave. Deep and dark, he looked into her, with questions and need and some fevered demand that couldn't be put into words. Sometimes she felt all that inside her, too, and wondered which of them had thrown it to the other first. 

"We should continue on." His voice was soft. "There's nothing for us here." 

His footsteps shook the balcony. He walked around the corner of the station, to where the iron grate met the stairs, leaving the shotgun shells where he'd put them. She didn't bother to pick them up. 

She expected him to head southward, and break one way or the other for another substation. Instead, he cut northeast, uphill, climbing the path ahead slowly. Sort of seemed like he wasn't interested in scavving for pistol primer anymore. If he ever had been in the first place.

When she caught him, he slowed up more. "Forgive me," he said, as they passed through a patch of high, dry sagebrush. "I didn't mean to walk ahead without you." 

She shrugged. "You didn't, really." 

"And I did not mean to leave your question unanswered. It's that—" He bit back his words, his eyes worried again when he looked at her. "I've never spoken this to anyone." 

Then he kept walking. They fell into an easy pace where the land flattened out at North Fork. He didn't talk, neither did she. He needed room for all his thoughts, she could feel it. It swirled around them like a dust devil, hot and chaotic, painful if you got in its way.

The battered old park signs wavered on their poles. The metal skeletons of what used to be cars sunk deep into the sand. There were real skeletons inside them, stuck there forever, like the cars, like the signs. 

He paused beside a flipped-over camper, its door peeled away by something large and angry, or hungry. 

"As you know," he began, "I was part of the Legion since its inception. For many years I had been... disillusioned." He must have caught her doubtful look, because he shook his head—not at her, at himself. "I realize how precious that sounds considering the circumstances. But I was done with it all. With what I had become." 

Joshua's shoulders sagged, loose and sloped as the trail behind them. "The things I told you about. It was a lifetime of those acts." He closed his eyes.

Eddy knew. The stories, the legend of the Malpais Legate—they were tales to set you scared straight, and fear the inhuman might of the Legion. The truth of it was worse. It was a bunch of men. No different from the people they enslaved and killed. No stronger or more wicked, even. A little more organized, a little more shameless.

_Man's inhumanity to man._ Arcade said that, said it every damn time they found Legion slaves and cut them loose. Which was too fucking many times. It helped, though, to remember. They were men. Even Caesar. Men, you could kill. Men, you could remove from this world with less time than it took to lace up your boots in the morning.

He was quiet. She gave him room to speak. They'd been down a few paths like this before, but there was always something he kept back. It was easy for her to see it, because she'd done it the whole time. First, who she was. Then, when he knew her, the things she'd done. Now that he knew that, all that was left to hide was that clawing want, that ache. 

And there was her worry.

"I thought about my old life sometimes. Or a life that might have been, had I returned home from that mission, before things grew to be so—" Something stirred up in him, and with his eyes open and hard, he shook off whatever had been in his mind. Feeling pitiful, maybe, and that was like poison. Left a bad taste in the mouth, pain in the gut. He took to walking again, waving his hand for her to come along. 

The trail sloped up again, and emptied, past the campground. He was headed for the Sun Sentinels.

"I tested, in the last few years. Sabotages," he said, "to be clear. Mangled orders. Contubernia sent on raids to nowhere." They walked slow. He held his hands tight behind his back. "Caesar, he had suspicions, but no alternatives. We were at constant war. He needed me."

The way she heard it, the Legion was rotten with suspicions. Jumpy, everyone always looking over their shoulder. That you attacked whoever got in your way, and they got out of your way for good, or you were too dead to care. 

"Why didn't you just kill him?" she asked. "You told me yourself the Legion won't last without him."

He studied her for a moment. "The thought came to me many times." 

The path grew narrow and steep, loose rocks and the sandy cliff crumbling into nothing but air and a mile-long drop that made Eddy's feet sweat in her boots. She clung to the dusty rock face and inched along, holding her breath. 

Joshua came close, blocked her from the cliffside. The light press of his hand on her lower back pushed her forward. It was less a comfort than he must have meant it to be.

Warm as the day was already, his hand was hot through the old flannel she wore. The heat stayed there, the pressure, too, even when he took his hand away, and let her walk ahead where the path widened. A ghost touch. Like all those handprints painted onto the rocks, the taboo places. 

"There were complications." He spoke to her back, as he climbed behind her. "For one, I was not entirely convinced of my own motives. I might have simply taken his place." 

That stopped her dead. She turned around.

"And then where would we be?" He looked up at her, sorry, fearful, longing, testing—all there in his eyes. 

A cold knot twisted in Eddy's stomach. She spun back to the trail and kept walking. 

She didn't want to picture it. Joshua as Caesar. He would have been the monster she imagined hunting, imagined putting down. Worse, even, because it was him. But she wouldn't have known _him._

And what if she'd used that gold coin they gave her to go see him? Would it have been the same as meeting him here, in Zion—the fear all hopped up in her, until the fear turned into that damned want? 

He'd have been whole and healthy. Handsome, she would bet caps on it. What if he used those eyes and that voice, all those pretty words that went to her gut, to convince her that everything she heard was untrue... What then? 

Joshua was beside her again. Didn't know when he'd got there. 

"So what did you do?" Her voice sounded small, all of a sudden. Felt small.

"I fought on, and well, most of the time. Until something fell into place."

The trail curved and switchbacked, winding up and up, until it went flat.

"It was Hoover Dam," he said. "I saw my path."

The Sentinels clawed up on either side like they held the plateau to the sky. They walked onto the flatland side by side. 

Eddy turned to him. "You mean you saw the trap." 

He met her stare, and nodded. "I'm not a fool. The Dam had us doomed, mostly thanks to my efforts. Not all of them conspiratorial. Some were merely mistakes. It amounted to the same, in the end.

"I knew it was my chance," he said. "I wanted the Legion to die. If it did not, then I would. Neither happened, as it were."

It was hard to believe. Especially the easy way he told it now. But he'd never once lied to her. It must have felt good, after so long in that self-made hell, to kick at the lock on the door. To break their trust. If he'd done a little more, if he...

Joshua searched her face. "Whatever the Lord has in mind for us, it is not for me to know." 

Then his gaze moved past her again, over the tall claws. "Do you think you could climb up?" He gestured toward the flat slope that eased onto the side of the sentinel rock. You'd have to jump onto the surface, wide enough to sit on, and... high.

"You first," she said.

He laughed, short and sharp. "Very well." She followed him, and every long step he took up the slope, he'd turn and make sure she was there with him. She couldn't look at the vista yet. It was easier to look at him, focus on his feet in the dust, on his hard grip that brought her up by her hands, lifted her onto the rock with him, and pulled her even further from the edge to a safer spot. 

So they sat together at what felt like the top of the entire world. 

The breeze was thin and hot. The sun flamed overhead and Eddy's scalp burned. She fished the cowboy hat from her pack, smoothed out the crumpled straw, and put it on. Steadied her shaking hands against the rock beneath her, and looked at Joshua.

He leaned on one hand and stared out across the canyon, head tilted like a raven.

_The trap_ was Boulder City. Hanlon told her about it on that rickety hotel balcony at Camp Golf. That he and Oliver outmaneuvered and outmanned the Legate and funneled him into a pit of concrete and bombs. That they'd whipped all those tribals in skirts so bad they turned tail for years. They'd lost a settlement to do it, and so many men and women. 

But Joshua Graham lived, and kept on living long enough to find who he was again. Lived long enough for her to know him.

Humanity—or whatever you could really call it when it came to ghouls and super mutants and who knew what else—well, it didn't die easy. She'd accused Joshua of losing his that day she was sick from datura, of throwing it away for Caesar. 

If what he said was true, he'd been searching for it. Maybe it had taken the Dam, and the Grand Canyon, for him to pick it up again. Or maybe he gathered up all those ashes, and made something new.

She could do that, too. 

Her canteen had fallen deep into her pack, heavy at the bottom, with extra bullets and that little silver 9mm. She bent over to reach in and grab it, then took a long drink. It was warm, but good enough. 

She held it out to him. After a little pause, when she feared he might say no, he took it from her hand with a soft _thank you._

His fist curled over his chin, and he eased down the bandages that covered his mouth. The skin she could see was pink and mangled and tight. His thin lips wrapped around the spout, where her lips had been, and his throat moved when he swallowed. He closed his eyes. She watched it all, boldly, didn't even pretend not to. It was damned near indecent how it made her feel. 

She yanked the brim of the hat down tighter and folded her arms.

"As you tell it to me," he said, twisting the metal cap onto the canteen spout, "war drums beat once again around the Dam." 

"That's what everybody says. And they want me in it. Can't think why," she muttered.

"You can't?" Joshua set the canteen between them. "You seem to have more influence than I ever had." 

And she didn't want a damn bit of it. "Sure, and I'm wasting time sitting on a rock talking to you," she said with a smile. 

He cut a sidelong glance at her. "I hope you don't truly think that." His voice was kind. 

The brim of her hat framed the sky between its tan straw and the red canyon ridges. It was blue, nothing but familiar, beautiful blue. "You know I don't."

She felt his eyes on her. "I can't teach you anything. God knows. But if I can be a lesson to you..." He shifted his legs and stretched them out toward the edge. "I fear the Legion will never die. The NCR failed," he said. "I failed."

Past was past. Like everybody else, the Legion was different now. Different men, different plans. It wasn't just the Dam they wanted. It was everything, and everyone. They had to be put down. But it wouldn't be a straight path. It would switchback like hiking up to the Sentinels. It would take patience. It would take purpose.

It would take all the ire and revenge she could find. She didn't have that burning inside her, not anymore. But she could take his. 

She would take on all of it. Not for him, but because of him. He was wrong. He taught her so much. 

Joshua taught her making war on good people was bad for the soul. Seemed like the opposite should be true. 

"I'll see to it," she said. 

He took a long look at her. "I think you could." 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Long chapter! *sweats* This is the last flashback scene. Only forward movement from here.
> 
> This song was on my mind during this chapter: [This Mortal Coil - The Jeweller](https://youtu.be/aghket3BJPE)
> 
> Hope everyone out there is safe and sound <3 Thank you, as always, for reading.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is explicit, and you will see that as soon as you begin reading.

_—Now—_

Joshua held Eddy's thighs wide open so long her hip joints stung. He licked her so long, relentless. Already he made her come like this—it took her by surprise, she bucked and whined while he bore her down—but he didn't stop then. She wouldn't say stop. She flailed. Dizzy, blind, weak. Her heart and cunt throbbed, her mouth cried, and the rest of her didn't matter much.

"Damn, goddamn," she mumbled through clenched teeth. 

He made a low, harsh snarl, a wordless scold that shouldn't have felt so good to hear. His fingers curled and clawed around her ass. 

All she could see of him was the top of his head, bandages cockeyed and loose. See his head nod up, down, telling her _yes, Eddy, yes._ All she could feel of him were rigid fingers dug urgent and hungry into her soft parts, and that mouth. Oh, it could do more than talk pretty. Oh, indeed.

Every gulp for air had the smell of them in it. The fire's char, the sand-stained, musty bandages, and Joshua's skin, fever-hot. Ripe, like a cactus pear past picking. Her own sticky sweat, her unwashed heat. He drank it in, moaning. He wanted it. 

A wet rhythm echoed around them, his suck, her groan. It sloped and ebbed. The picture flashed in her mind's eye: that soaked Virgin shoreline, the river lapping wide and steady at the sand. But she was the river, he was the earth thirsting to swallow her up. 

His hot, hard hand squeezed, then smoothed over her hip. His tongue made the same moves—snaked sharp around her clit. When the ache flamed up again, when she twisted and hitched, the tongue flattened and rolled flush into her slow. Her thighs arched around his head, weightless and trembling. She was floating, flying. 

If datura felt like this, she'd have picked the canyon clean. 

"Shit," she gasped. "Oh, fuck."

He broke away, breath heavy. He gripped her jaw and drew her mouth open, pinching her kiss-bruised lip. 

"Pleasant words," he said, his head resting on her thigh, "are as a honeycomb." He placed one gentle, open kiss on her swollen clit. Her foot jerked. "Sweet to the soul. I was sure I'd read you the Proverbs."

Somewhere between the hum of his voice and the heat of his mouth, Eddy found a sound to speak her bewilderment. "Huh?"

She felt his stiff smile against her leg. "Speak sweetly. Please?" His hand slid to her breast, kneading with his scarred palm. 

Oh. Her cursing. He should know by now that she— Well. Damn it, he'd never once said _please_ to her and meant it like you were supposed to. Didn't make a habit of asking for anything. If he asked, instead of ordered, if he begged a little like that...

There was only one sweet thing she could think of to say. She swallowed thickly, her throat tight, and took in a deep, fluttering breath. "Joshua," she whispered. The way she had done so many times in her head, dreaming how it might be. 

It wasn't like how she'd dreamed up. It was better, because it was real and _he_ was real. It was worse, because there'd come a time soon when she would only be whispering it to herself.

His hand on her breast stilled, then the fingers stroked soft down her side. One slow sweep of his tongue up her cunt again. Another sucking kiss to her wet folds. Then another. 

Eddy seized the sweat-damp sleeping bag in her fists and closed her eyes to the fire flickering on the cave walls, to his covered head between her sore legs. To only hear and feel him. 

"Joshua, Joshua, I—" Her whine broke when he went faster, harder. When his moans shuddered each time he heard his name in her mouth. When the pleasure swirled up and smothered her.

It was the opposite of that gunshot, of being killed. That took everything away. That was black and cold and nothing. This—it gave everything. Heat and color and the too-much sweetness and life and pain of it all. 

She'd met death head on, and her soul, whatever it was and wherever it lay low inside her—it told death to fuck right off. This was why. To feel all that.

Sometime he stopped, she could barely tell. Sometime he let go of her ass, stretched out her legs, and left her to lie there, eyes closed, to catch her breath and calm her heart. There were muted, hard steps—his boots were still on, for some damn reason—and sharp creaks. A frustrated _hmm,_ she knew that sound well now. A slosh of water inside metal. Joshua stepping close again, slowing as he did. 

She opened her eyes when he knelt beside her, a warm hand on her arm. "Here." In his hands was the canteen she'd heard, dented and dusty and half-full from the sound of it. She pushed herself up, woozy, and took it from him. 

It was welcome. Her throat was hoarse and cracked from gasping and moaning. Had to imagine his was worse, that his jaw and tongue were cramped up, stiff and sore. She liked imagining that, a little, and a smile she couldn't hide crept up and curved her lips around the canteen spout.

He noticed, his own thin mouth smirking. He didn't ask why she smiled. Just waited for his turn, hands in his lap. Patient and meek like he must have been as a boy at worship, or praying over his meager meals. 

She'd seen him do it these four months—pray quiet and unmoving, eyes shut to the world while he spoke his heart. It was a sight. How he could hold the storm of his guilt and rage tight in his fist long enough to let that heart speak what it truly wanted.

Eddy gave him the canteen. He'd shed his shirt, naked as she'd ever seen in just that frayed and tattered gauze from the waist up. When he drank, the water rolled down his pink, tangled chin, down his neck where the bandages hung loose. The spill caught the firelight and glittered.

He'd told her as much, after they let Salt-Upon-Wounds go. That he prayed the wild fire of his anger would die away, a cold, ashy pit he could kick sand over and forget. She thought it was kinda funny, him telling her that in the river, safe and cool. She wasn't sure it worked like that. Because she burned the same way inside. Because ever since then, what sparked up between them was just as fierce. 

Joshua capped the canteen and set it away. His bare hand, its thick, bent fingers, lifted to her forehead. His palm blocked the light from her eyes. A gentle sweep brushed her skin. He cleared the sweat-stuck hair and stroked it back from her face. That bright, crushing squall stirred inside her. The thing, that used to be plain wanting, now it was mixed up with giving and getting. It was a sweeter feeling for all that, so sweet it damn near choked her. 

She hugged him close and pulled him down with her, to lie there with him circled in her tired arms, his head on her chest.

Those fires he prayed about, they never really die. She knew that, and knew the hurt it took to learn it. Knew what the flames felt like when they churned up so they were all you saw anymore. They could tamp down to ember, but fire would eat whatever you fed it. The fuel might be revenge. It might be love. 

One of his hands felt along the rim of her ribs. He kissed her collarbone, took a long, slow breath in, and she heard his mouth open to speak. It was only after a quiet minute that he asked, "Are you happy, Eddy?" 

He asked it like he hadn't one clear notion how happiness looked or felt. He asked it like he was, all this time later, thinking on the stupid thing Daniel said about her. Or maybe it's that _she_ was. 

She'd been delighted in the early evening, when the stars were so shiny and shooting like stray bullets. Contented when he lay beside her, thrilled when he touched her. Fuckin' giddy when she kissed him. Yes, she was happy, so goddamn happy she wouldn't know the words to speak it. 

But there was a cloud over it all, like always. In her mind, she saw endings and goodbyes, and no comfort to come but the black of sleep and her dreams. Saw herself walking out of the valley, alone. 

"About as happy as I've ever been," she answered him, and there was more truth in that than he could ever know. 

Her fingers fiddled with the loose gauze at his neck. "Are you?"

Joshua took her fiddling hand in his and drew it over his head. He sat up with a grunt. "I don't recall the last time I was happy. Relieved, perhaps. Joyful, to see my people. To know God's love again. But simple happiness..." 

He turned back to her. The firelight behind him outlined his face—a dark, warm shadow. It looked the way his voice sounded—deep and damaged and full of curves and colors she couldn't make out. "I believe I've felt that for some time now." He stroked her fingers with his own, circling the knuckles. "Only the Lord knows why I should deserve any happiness in this life. I cannot fathom it. But I have thanked Him each day for you. Each day since the first."

What wasn't a blur of blood and soreness from those days in the cave, or sleep... all Eddy could recall was how puzzled and suspicious she was. Watching this man who should have been everything she feared and hated—the things she liked to kill—care for her, calm and abiding. 

"I didn't like you much, then," she said, and wished she hadn't, not now, truthful though it was. Things changed so much. Had to be he understood what she meant, her fool words.

And he laughed, short and soft, so she figured he did understand. "I did not like you overmuch, either." It was only fair to hear it.

His stiff thumb traced her palm. "You were sullen and ungrateful for my aid. Though I understood why, you bit at my fragile patience. And my pride. I can admit those sins."

"You sure hid it well enough," she said. 

"Truly?" He hummed. "I didn't think so. More than that, however, I was afraid of you." 

Then it was Eddy's turn to laugh. "Me?" Now that was not the story going round. What the good NCR citizens knew was that the living Malpais Legate had feared no soul, and that the Burned Man would bring his wrath upon Caesar, and anybody who was in the way, like a vengeful ghost. She sat up, peeling the sticky sleeping bag from her naked back. "Couldn't have done much to you in the state I was in." 

He smiled. "Oh yes, you could. I told you once, you have a terrible strength. It is one of the countless things I admire in you." 

Maybe it was that her thoughts were fuzzy from all he did between her legs, or maybe his smile and his _admiration_ just fried whatever brains she had left. No matter the cause, she didn't get it. She took his forearm in her hand and caressed the rims and pits of his scars. "Then why'd you keep me so close? You could have got rid of me. Easy." _Why were you kind? Why to me?_

Joshua leaned in, a hand on her shoulder. This close, in shadow, the deep blue of his eyes darkened into that blue-black of the night sky. "God spared you from the assault. There was a reason and a purpose. You are one of His instruments on this earth. If you were to be my end, I would meet you with whatever grace I could muster. If you were not, I would be doing God's will by ensuring you could fulfill His plans. I believe I made the right choice," he said, stroking his rough hand down her arm. "It seems to have been to my benefit."

Believing what he believed would have made it easy. "What about all those assassins?" _What about the ones that might come when I leave?_ "They don't have a part in it?"

"They are not you." He was fixed on it. The simple truth was that, to him, these were plain facts. 

And since there was no argument she even wanted to make against it, she just took in that strange comfort it brought to her. All the faith he had in everything that happened. In her.

Her fingers raised from his arm to his cheek, brushed down his neck. At her touch, his eyes shut. The light caught his skin, the thin, blue-veined eyelids. They were smooth. The fire had not touched them. She felt along his brow. The eye twitched. She wondered how much of his face, his body, was unscarred like that. What it all looked like.

She edged a fingertip beneath the gauze at his temple. "Would you let me see you? Without all this?" 

His eyes blinked open. For a second, there was the fear again shivering and hard in the blue. For a second, there was the tight grind in his jaw, the sharp breath. Then it all faded. His wide shoulders dropped. "If you want that," he whispered. 

"If _you_ want." She swept the back of her hand against his jaw and felt it relax.

He reached for her hand and pulled it away, took the other, held both in his lap. A quiet time passed while the fire crackled faint, and he sat beside her, staring into the black yonder of the cave. Navigating, she could tell, all the rocks in that path. They were pitted, cracked and ugly. They would bloody your feet if you weren't careful.

Neither of them had ever walked an easy road. That's what boots were for, right? Put 'em on the ground and move. There were always two choices, in the end. He didn't have to do what she asked. But she'd never asked for much. Only him. 

A hard breath left him, and he let go of her hands. His own raised to the back of his head. There was a knot there, she'd seen, that held the gauze tight. She barely heard the rip through the bandages. They slacked around his nose, loosening like the strips that hung around his neck. Then he unwound, circling his arm overhead. Like a ranch hand untying a brahmin calf's feet. Setting her free. 

Joshua didn't turn from her. Didn't hide. But neither did he stare challenging and hard into her eyes like he'd done so many times. He did not dare her to keep looking, or to look away from the sight of him. He focused on the task at hand, brow bent in concentration, his thin mouth snapped shut. 

Her hands ached to touch him, but she clamped her fists tight and let him finish. 

Whatever mottled, patchy ghoul skin or tangle of red scars she might have imagined under all that gauze was dead wrong. His face wasn't worse than that. It wasn't better. It was... what it was. 

The lightning bolt ridges of scarred skin were finer than on his arms, but there were so many more. The skin had tightened and drawn around his nose, crooking the bridge of it sharply sideways. One nostril was intact, the other mangled and healed half-shut. There were deep pockets along his cheek where the skin seemed not burned at all, but surrounding them were threads of hard, pink flesh. There were other holes, gashes, dark purple hollows where there was hardly any skin to be seen. Scars spread over him like a dozen matted gourd vines. They snarled along the curves and bones of his face. 

He wound the gauze down to his neck, tore it again, and let the long, frayed strips fall into his lap. 

The top of his head shone in the firelight—bright and veiny, like his chin and eyelids. Tufts of fuzzy, short hair dotted his scalp, like needlegrass in the sand, shot through with meandering creekbed scars. 

He watched her watching him, and waited. 

Somehow, seeing those bits of hair knotted up her mind. Before, he would have been unscarred, a head full of dark hair if he was lucky, gray at his ears. If she thought about what he had been like then, she had to think of what he _was_ then. How long it took to walk that bloody road to this cave. 

Caesar did this to him. Caesar had done a lot more. Caesar had to answer for it. Cut off the head, the body rots. Kill the queen, the rest of the fucking bugs are lost. 

Sometimes the heat in Eddy was so high it ate through any sense she had left. She felt it in Oak Creek, circling that tied-up old man while he screamed through the gag he'd always shut her up with. At the Tops, with her pistol shoved deep in the mouth of that checkerboard piece of shit. Outside her mama's shack. 

Oh, she knew what Joshua meant that day, about wild fires. They sprawled so quick and hot, they burned you, and everyone around you. You couldn't put them out yourself. You needed someone else. 

Gently, she took his face in her trembling hands. He didn't flinch like she expected. His shut-tight mouth opened on a breath. 

This was only one man's pain. It was nothing next to the rest of the Legion's crimes. The ones he had more than a part in. But this was the price he paid to be whole again. Not that burned skin, not the body he thought was so ruined—the hatred, the anger. He had to swallow it all and fight for the Sorrows, because his tribe was already a shadow. He had to swallow it because he couldn't get the revenge he wanted. 

Salt-Upon-Wounds' blood was not Edward Sallow's. That blood wouldn't wash him clean. 

If she fought for someone else, too, maybe then she would see whether the fires would ever die hungry. Whether Joshua was right about her and God. Whether they could both find some peace. 

Eddy placed a slow kiss to his temple. Raising up, another to the feathery hair, soft as a sagebrush fringe. "That doesn't hurt, does it?"

She felt him smile, his cheeks tugged up under her fingers. "Nothing hurts now," he said.

And there wasn't a thing she could hear more complimentary than that. Her hands slid down his bare neck. Like on his arms, the scars felt good against her skin. They were a part of him. 

"Where else can I touch you?"

Joshua searched her face, stared and studied like she was the one he was seeing plain for the first time. She must have looked wild, wide-eyed and starved—she felt like that. The want in her rumbled and shook from deep inside. He let her see this—_him_—and only her. It was a gift, and she'd never got many of those. Maybe that's what made her so greedy for more of it.

Eyes still on her, bright and sharp, he tore at the gauze again and stripped away what hid him. Soon his the rest of his arms were bare, his chest, and further down. The map of scars grew redder, thicker, fanned across him like bright red veins in his eyes. He clasped her wrist and drew her hand to his skin, to guide her through the landscape. 

"My front bears the most pain still," he said, lightly tracing her fingers over the splashes of red on his breastbone. "And under my arms. There are numb spots where I feel nothing, like your shoulder." He brought her hand to his left side, where she could hardly gauge his ribs through the wall of scars. 

Eddy bent over and kissed him there, his skin so hot against her cool lips. But he only shook his head, smiling that crooked, tight smile, and leaned away. She followed him down, he lay back onto the warm sleeping bag and grunted softly when his bare back touched the warm nylon. 

She couldn't stop kissing his body. Her lips, she figured, were way damn softer than her gun-callused hands. And it was so good to breathe in his sweet, heated scent, to feel him shiver each time her tongue met his skin—at the dip between his ribs, at the spare flesh that hid his hipbone. "Tell me if I hurt you," she whispered against his stomach. 

If his insistent, hard fingers winding into her hair, and the cut-off, swallowed moans low in his throat, were an answer to that, all her kisses did the opposite of hurt.

"Most parts are tender enough, but, _ah_"—he sighed when her tongue snaked down to the band of his underwear—"I can feel you." 

That was what she wanted.

She curled her fingers around the waist of his jeans, around the tattered elastic band of his underwear, carefully dragging them further down. "Can I?" 

Eyes half-shut, he nodded, and raised his ass to give her room. Slow and steady, like disarming a live frag, she eased them off. Beneath the pants, his legs were wound up with the same gauze, grayed and worn. There was nothing guarding his backside or his cock but the underwear—practical enough—and with those down around his knees, she was free to look. But she didn't touch. Not yet. 

Joshua moved to unknot the bandages around his thigh, but she placed a hand over his and shook her head. "Don't have to. You could at least take your boots off, though." 

He gave a short, breathy laugh. "Where are my manners?" He bent his legs close, jerked each boot from his foot, and pitched one, then the other, into the dark where they dropped to the dust with a flat thud. Then she untangled the pants from his feet. Unlike him, she didn't bother with the socks. 

Damn, in all her dreaming this was not the way it looked. Maybe even in Eddy's mind her sight was poor, because she'd never seen him clear when she imagined him. He'd been a blur of white and red most times. Heat and pressure and a full-throat growl. 

Here, where it was real, he was quiet and waiting. Here she could see each line of scar on his skin and the muscle beneath, the wet of his eyes and mouth, all his nakedness. Knees bent, he was shadowed, but there was the line of mangled ridges at his stomach that led to his cock. And there _it_ was, sizable but soft, darkly wrinkled and slashed with scars, lying thick against his thigh. 

She crawled closer, brushed her hand against the damaged skin just above it, then stroked lower. Her fingers tracked the length of him. "Do you feel here?"

"Yes." He gasped the word before she'd hardly finished the question. 

His sharp breaths came hard. Harder when she pressed her lips to him, and her own breath touched there. She opened her mouth, licked up the warm, loose skin, down to the tip that rested against the gauze on his leg. She kissed where the heft of his cock sat heavy on his balls, deep in the shadow of the firelight, and dared to lift it in her hands to kiss along the back, her mouth wet and hungry with all the urge she held back. 

Oh, the sounds he made. The choked sobs and sighs. The way one hand fisted tight at his hip, and the other shook while he stroked her hair. She was only half-sure they were the signs of his pleasure, and not pain. _Don't let me hurt you._ If he could know her thoughts, let him know that one. Let him know she only wanted him to feel what he'd given her. 

The truth, though. She damn well couldn't deny it. When she took him full in her mouth, that soft weight rolling on her tongue as she sucked him in, and his head bent back and he hissed and thrust toward her... She couldn't deny the throbbing between her own thighs forceful as before, how her cunt soaked and dripped down her leg when he groaned like that. That this was for her as much as him. That she would think on this part when she was alone and needy for him.

_"Yes."_

It was a harder _yes,_ one long, dark growl. It sent a shiver through her and she whined around his cock, a muted moan high-pitched as his was low. His fingers threaded along her head and gripped tight. Her scalp would smart later but he was right, nothing hurt when there was all this. She lapped at him, stroking his underside, and sucked at him faster. Stretching the slack length of him deeper into her, tasting the sour-salt seep from him at the back of her tongue.

Then his legs stiffened around her. His fingers knotted her hair. One shallow breath, one clenched-jaw, shuddering groan, and he spilled himself warm in her mouth. A few small spurts, she suckled softly while he finished, while he mumbled and whispered too quiet for her to hear. _Must be sweet words,_ she thought, swallowing the last of him, _like honey._

Eddy freed him from her mouth with one last, wet kiss. It was her turn to climb over him, gently though, minding his skin, and see how he looked now she had turned him inside out. The flames flickered a dappled, orange light onto his face. He stared back at her in disbelief—sweet, aching disbelief. When she bent to kiss his cheek, he caught her face in his hands and pulled her close, pressed his tight, scarred mouth against hers.

"Thank you," he said, catching his breath. 

The ache flashed in her chest. She'd called it want before, for lack of a better vocabulary. Maybe it was... something stronger. Oh, how the fuck would she know? Their foreheads touched. Her nose bumped against the stiff scars that marred his. She shut her mouth before she argued there was nothing to thank her for. If he wanted to, he could for now. No need to fight about it. 

"Did you know you could still do that?" she asked, stroking a lonely tuft of hair near the broken curve of his ear. 

Joshua closed his eyes and nodded. "In these months, I—" He sighed, his eyes shut tighter. "I thought of you. Forgive me for that." 

Well, now. Besides the notion in her that there was no need for thanks or forgiveness between people who wanted each other—at least not between the two of them, anyhow—there was a satisfaction in hearing that. Not pride in him thinking of her that way. Even a man like Joshua was still a man, and men could see an old hole in a log and start salivating. No, it was more like justice. She'd not had a mind to think upon it since he said it before, but he had wanted her for longer than she ever imagined. She hadn't been the only one twisted up with wild dreams and urges that needed hiding away. And that was only fair. 

"I thought about you, too. For a while, now." She untangled her legs from his and turned onto her side, at his side. She didn't expect his arm to wrap around her and cradle her closer. A heavy tiredness came over her. An ease to her mind, if not her heart. She'd been near him so many times, sleepy and calm by the fire, but this close... Her head rested in the crook of his shoulder, that pocket he'd shown her earlier. 

"Why'd we wait so long?" she asked with a drowsy laugh. 

But she knew why, all the hesitation and questions and fearful quiet. 

"Did we?" His scarred hand stroked her back, his dark voice echoing into her where her skin met his. "It seems only days since Follows-Chalk brought you to Angel Cave. Too brief a time."

She hummed into his chest, her eyes falling shut. On that point she was disposed to agree. Though the time that was left here was up to her, in another way it wasn't. She could drag it out, as she had been doing, but how long? Not forever, though part of her wanted that. Wanted to stay here next to Joshua as long as she could manage it, and not let go. 

So that's what she did. While the logs in the fire cracked and snapped. While the damp black of the cave at her back cooled her sweat. While the sure, sweet sounds of his breath settled her to sleep. 

  
\---

  
The silence woke her. Eddy sat up from the hard ground and the cold nylon. The camp lantern buzzed its blue-white light at the far, dark mouth. The fire died in the night and the cave was empty, unmoving. Except for Joshua, turned away from her on his side, his tight, bent hands relaxed in sleep. He must have brought the rough, worn blanket to cover them, another for the ground—the sleeping bag was hardly made for two. 

Didn't know how long they'd slept. Couldn't see any light from outside the cave, and there must have been a new day long past dawn. 

She was naked. She wanted her clothes. She wanted to crawl back under that blanket and hold him close until his heat warmed her through and she would sleep again, no matter how many days passed outside. She wanted to know that everything between them would stay like this, after she walked away. Even if she never saw him again. Even if all this only lived on in her bullet-punched brain, in her weak, clawing heart. 

Little wants, big wants. The little one was easy. Her clothes, she hoped, were lying flat on the dusty plateau, with her boots. And the gun. 

Joshua's broad back barely moved with his breathing. She'd never caught him sleeping so deep and sound. Always so many people around, so much noise and light, and though both were peaceable and calm, especially nowadays, it made sense to her why he would come to this far-flung cavern alone. To set silence against the storm in him, to hush everything loud and angry. 

She thanked him for sharing this place, this peace, with her by letting him sleep on. Easing out slow from under the blanket and tiptoeing her bare feet over the freezing cave floor, until she found her glasses, found where he'd flung her socks. Hopping them on quiet, and padding toward the mouth of the cave, where she found the daylight seeping through the black like a new-sprung creek.

Last night her mind kept tapping at her from the world outside, far outside. Everything that knocked on Zion's walls and yelled for her to come on out already. _Not yet_. She heard it in her mind, but in _his_ voice. 

_All these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet._

Sure, she'd felt like splitting quick was the right thing to do, for a couple of shaky moments in the night. That it might be smart to walk before the daylight hit, in case the night and the stars were the only thing pushing them together. But that was a stupid lie her rotten brain cooked up. It shrank and withered away. 

Joshua was right. The only Joshua Graham she had ever known, not the Legate, not some monster in the wilderness—he was nearly always right, damn him. What they had was a blessed thing. And if anybody wanted to take it, let them come try. 

The day outside the cave was already sunny. No one got up this high but a few bighorners, and they must have favored another, sharper cliffside than the one that led to the plateau. Nobody around, and yet she covered herself with her hands best she could. The bright, open sky, the sharp hills and the low valley that darkened into the river, the size of it all—she was defenseless and puny in the face of it. Being naked didn't help matters. Funny that being with Joshua, she felt so big and powerful. She hurried to the messy, strewn pile that must have been her clothes. 

The dust blew loose from her underpants, and the frayed, old corduroys. It was a red puff in the air and then it disappeared. She shook her undershirt clean and pulled it on, picked up the worn flannel from the ground, then stepped into her boots. 

Sunlight glared against the gun. It lay cold and dead near where they sat so long. Their handprints were clear in the dust, the tracks of how they'd moved. The gun watched the whole time. It was an ugly thing. Hardly wanted to pick it up at all, but she had to.

When she crouched to reach for it, there was a faint rustle at her back. 

"Don't go."

She turned to look. Joshua, at the cave mouth, staring at her. He was half-dressed in his unbuttoned, dirty jeans, that dust-stained shirt that might have been white once, open on his bare skin. No bandages to be seen. There was something whole about his face that way, uncovered and still new to her, the scars catching the sun. There was something whole about _him_.

Eddy wasn't such a fool that she would tell him he was beautiful. But she did think it. The other thought came to her just as strong: she didn't give one fuck what he had been before she met him. She had been someone else, too. Everything changed then. 

The gun stayed where it lay. Eddy walked back to the cave.

She wasn't going anywhere. Not yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Joshua chides Eddy with Proverbs 16:24, but perhaps he was also thinking of Song of Songs again:   
_Thy lips, O my spouse, drip as the honeycomb: honey and milk are under thy tongue.... I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey._
> 
> I hope everyone is safe and well right now <3 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading, I truly appreciate it more than I can say. 
> 
> Between chapters, I do some fiddly things on [tumblr](https://juniper-tree.tumblr.com/): meta comments on writing this story (perhaps others in the future) at [this tag](https://juniper-tree.tumblr.com/tagged/canyon-echo), and playing with video game botany in this post: [The real flora of fake Zion](https://juniper-tree.tumblr.com/post/611450056871149568/the-real-flora-of-fake-zion).


	14. Chapter 14

_—Three days after—_

  
The cave was their home for another few days, Eddy guessed. Time was hard to track in the dark, a rhythm of sometimes sun, sometimes not, when either of them left that cave mouth for a hasty task, then hurried back to the other soon as it was finished. 

When they grew hungry, they raided the boxes and shelves Joshua kept there, ate through his stash of pinyon nuts and dried yao guai. He left Eddy in the firelit dark—too long, she itched for him to return—to pick banana yucca and agave to roast. When they grew thirsty, they finished the canteen. After Eddy said maybe they should go back, climb down to where they could drink from the river again—just like that, rain poured over the canyon. It spattered the dust and slicked the plateau. 

They saved the rainwater in a couple of old buckets. They had everything they needed. _A dark little Eden,_ Joshua said, kissing her hand.

They touched and tasted. More than that, they spoke to each other—soft and open. There was nothing left to hide.

They kept themselves away as long as they dared. What the tribes thought, what Daniel thought—they'd find out soon enough. 

Both Joshua and Eddy were known to disappear. Days at a time, even. Eddy was used to sleeping where she found herself tired, and in those days she helped Joshua and Daniel prepare, any place with a roof was a luxury. The clean, silky beds at the 38 were something else. A fine spot to rest at the end of a day, or a trip, but a lonely one. She would always prefer this ratty sleeping bag, these mildewed blankets, as long as he was there beside her.

This cave was Joshua's spot. He told her Follows-Chalk had come to look for him here once, when he'd been low and angry, alone for more than a week. "This was before you came into my life," he said, stroking his rough hand along her shin.

The White Legs killed a young Dead Horses scout he'd grown fond of. He baptized her not three weeks before. The other Disciples of Canaan had helped him take her into the cool water then. Later, they helped him bury her beside by that stream, nothing to mark her grave but a splintered cross of tied-up, broken branches. 

"Hiding myself then," he said, "was cowardice, but it was protection for them. From my rage. God may be wrathful when He chooses. Once I took that as a guide. But it was an excuse, for my own foul sins. This is not hiding." He pressed her palm to his bare cheek. It flushed hot against her skin. "I could not hide if I wanted to."

And Eddy? Well, she was rightly stuck. 

If she had gone back to Vegas before that night, in the days—hell, _the weeks_—she'd been thinking on it, it would have been simple. It would have been the normal way of things for her. She would fret and kick rocks the whole way. Think _what if_ and wonder after Joshua. Drink up her last bourbon until the bottle let her down, empty and useless to help her forget him. 

She didn't walk then. She stayed, and let everything change. There was not one lick of regret in her over it. Thankful, she was, and happy. But she could not stay there forever. Not in that cave. Not in Zion.

The cave was warm. Its black emptiness held them like two dark, soft hands. Eddy stayed in her sweaty underthings, close to the fire, curled up on that sleeping bag with Joshua. He wore more clothes than her. He didn't like being so exposed.

It got so damn hot in the Mojave, walking under that sun. Cold, clear nights, sure, you'd want on anything you could get. But the days. Dust, nothing, it got in every crack and pocket anyway. She didn't know how they stood it half the time. She was always peeling off shirts or hiking up pants. Seemed like the less she wore, the more Arcade refused to take off. He'd roll down his sleeves. He'd button that shirt right up to his throat. 

"What are you smiling over?" Joshua tipped her chin toward him. 

Eddy laughed. "Old stuff. Thinking on Arcade. We were together a lot, I just—" She shrugged and shook her head when her throat went cold and thick with worry. "I hope he's doing okay." 

Joshua studied her, his eyes bright blue in the firelight. "I almost feel as though I know him, through you. Your love for him," he said. It wasn't a question of whether she did, but maybe how. There was a teasing out in him saying it. A search. 

And she did love Arcade. He was the first person she'd ever thought that about. She never imagined there might be love in that heart of hers—not truly, not beyond the average, human, hope-you-don't-die feeling for anybody on one of her routes or stops. Anybody she'd helped stay alive in one way or another, through goods or guns. 

Boone was the second, once he let her in on the sorry truth of his life. Then Cass, Raul, Veronica, Lily. Follows-Chalk, too, had a little piece of her. She loved them all, and they probably didn't know, because she had no fuckin' clue how to say it. 

But Joshua. She touched along the bright scars at his chest. If what she felt for all of them was love, what was this? Sure as hell it wasn't the same as that fond sweetness that soaked into her, like honey on bread, when she thought of her friends. 

It was the most desperate hunger. It was a scream from deep inside. It howled for him and it howled at the thought of letting him go. It was only soothed by his nearness, by his touch. Or else it frothed and raged, like Ghost of She. 

She could barely keep it shut up inside her. She didn't know what might happen if it got free. 

A chill shuddered down her bones. Nerves or fear or want, everything was a mess inside her. She edged closer to the fire, lay her head against his bent knee and stared into the flame. "Arcade's _my friend,"_ she said, to let him know what was what.

He huffed. "Perhaps I do sound envious. Forgive me." He stroked her hair. 

"You know I have to go back sometime." Saying it made that feeling claw at her ribs. She clutched at his leg and held tight.

"Do you?" His hand cupped under her chin. Her eyes closed to the fire. "Imagine it. I have."

"Yeah, I have, too," she sighed. And what would happen if she didn't. After she took care of that... situation at the Tops, that devil in an ugly suit, everybody wanted something from her, and they had her trapped. She wasn't important. She was caught in the middle of a standoff, and the guns weren't even pointed at her. But she would catch the crossfire if she didn't make a move. So would her friends. The people she loved.

If she never went back, if she disappeared into the red sand and hills and said adios to the world... Well, there would be a reckoning. The world would come for her, the way she had come for them that hurt her. It would reach into Zion, or wherever they might roam together. 

Because that's what she imagined, now that she and Joshua were here, side by side, her dreams of him more or less come true. She whispered to him about it, he listened with gentle hums. New dreams, of far plains and dusty little houses. People who didn't know them from a hole in the ground—or no people. A couple of brahmin, a few scraggly chickens. Joshua kissed at her ear and asked for a creek nearby. He'd grown used to the sound of water. 

She could stop walking and stay put a while. He could rest easy and free. 

If he truly wanted that. His people, what were left of them, they might want him back. The Dead Horses, since he owed them so much, they might collect payment. And she, she might get roped into more work, more effort. When would the world let them go?

And at the back of both their minds, traps and alarms. Probably always would be, no matter what she took care of in the Mojave. But it could be easier, if she made that move. 

Sometimes it felt like they talked about that house by the creek, that other life, like it would never really come to be. That pissed Eddy off something fierce. She wanted it. And she was growing accustomed to getting what she wanted. 

"Got things that need doing," she said. She sat up, leaned into his heavy body. "Let me take care of a few things. Then maybe... Maybe it could be different. Maybe the world could loose its hold on us for a while. Find that place for just you and me." 

Joshua stared into the shadowy cave, his eyes kind and sad, like he thought that place for them was some kind of oasis. A temptation, but nothing real. "You know," he said, taking her hand in both of his, "I would have you stay by my side. Damn the world and leave it for the Lord and His judgment. But you and I are different. And praise Him for that." 

Eddy gripped his fingers tight, then let them go. She didn't think they were so different. She was inclined to think they were too much alike. 

"When I went into the world to change it, to spread the Word, I spread darkness. I was corrupted, or I was corrupt. The world found the black in my soul and clawed its fingers in so deeply. You, however." He faced her. His thick fingers brushed the wild hair from her face. "You would correct my mistakes? Make the world a brighter place? I know you could. You have already done that here." 

She stood on her knees and took his face her in her hands. "It ain't about fixing anything you did. Only setting a few things right. Balance the good and bad. I have to—" The words stopped behind her teeth. "I have to take care of the people I love," she said. 

They looked at each other, quiet. She wondered if she should say it. Say that love was a weak and foolish word for what she felt for him. But Joshua might not think so. In his mind, love was a burning thing, the fierce pitch and tremble of holy fire. Love saved him from Caesar and brought him home. It led him to her. 

His face, his eyes softened. It slowed the violent, hard beat of her heart. "And God will protect you. He will return you to me." 

She nodded. She had to believe it.

Joshua eased himself from her grip and crawled for a fresh log. He set it among the low flames and poked at the fire before he returned. 

"The night we fought the White Legs," he said, and drew her close, between his legs, her back to him, "you were stronger than I was. You did not show fear. I leaned upon you and you led the way." He kissed her shoulder, his hands trailed along her stomach, her thighs. He sighed into her hair. "You never faltered." He said it more like he was reminding himself. Convincing himself. 

She'd done what needed to be done. It was no small task and she didn't mind credit, not from him. Same time, though, she was no general. She could fight, and she could scheme, and she could lie. She'd been a damn good liar once. If Zion, if Joshua, hadn't broken that in her. She was out of practice, because she'd told him the truth from the jump. Something in her demanded it, even in the beginning. She would never regret that, either.

"We did that together," she said. "This'll be different."

"You never weakened," he whispered against her neck.

No. She never did.

Now she sank into his touch. She'd always held herself so hard and tight, the way the world snatched you and wouldn't let go. You had to, to live. Or she used to think so. This wasn't weakness. Let her have a few more nights of this. Let her stay warm and close to him, safe and easy in his hands, in the valley favored by God. Because _outside_ wasn't.

  
\---

  
Dawn broke blue over the hills. The plateau was pale and empty. The gun hung around. Eddy stuffed it in her pants before the lady caught her eye.

Joshua's boots stepped soft behind her on the cold dust. Clean gauze covered him up again. His keen eyes looked all the moreso for it. She'd watched him wrap himself in the long bandages, circling each limb slow, each finger, each corner, over and over. Hiding what he'd given to her. 

He'd gathered up the things he wanted from the cave—bullets and rations, the sleeping bag, the blankets, her. The bag and blankets he rolled up tight, and strapped to his back with a frayed rope. Her he let lead the way, guiding when she asked, on the calm, slow hike down to the camps, to the river. 

They stopped a lot. To take sight from another vista that let you look beyond the canyon to the green woods. To pick through a ranger station for anything she might want. To sit together in the shade, in the sand, against a hot boulder. They found a buffaloberry bush in full fruit now. He fed a berry into her mouth with his dark fingers. It was sour, it bit her tongue. She kissed his dry fingertips. He stared at her, blinking, then took her hard in his arms. 

She wished they'd done this before, this easy walking. Everything between them had been fight or fear. Now they could enjoy each other proper. They could walk peaceful and easy. She could gather up the last of the valley around her, inside her, wanting as much of it, of him, as she could hold onto. 

When they sloshed up the bank of the Dead Horses camp, it was all _hoi yah_ and smiles. At the Narrows they got the same, friendly shouts of _holadu._ Nothing changed. What a wide fucking canyon there was between outside yourself and inside. From inside, everything was new. It was better. Eddy thought it must show somehow, glowing from her skin like one of those bright ghouls. She was mutated, permanently. But no one else said so. It was something only she and Joshua could see.

Things went on the way they had since the White Legs were driven out. Joshua and Eddy ate with the others, talked with them. Joshua counseled the Disciples who had questions, the ones who trusted him more than Daniel, to both men's consternation. Eddy trekked uphill with the scouts to hunt gecko, and helped haul the heavy bodies to camp on her back. But she never hiked out too far, those last days. She wanted to get back to him, to see him, to be near him. 

They slept together, on that sweaty sleeping bag and blankets in the back of Angel Cave, where Joshua put her once. They were chaste but close, and anybody who might wander so far into the thickest dark of the cave might have seen, with a lantern or torch, that they held each other through the night. 

If anybody crept up behind them during their hikes into the valley, they might've seen a whole lot more. They took that slick, dripping path to the waterfall east. You could walk behind it, let the spray spatter you wet and cool, and hide in the craggy alcove. 

Joshua had her pushed against that cave wall and clutched at her like it was the first time he ever had. The mist soaked her skin. She held tight to his damp shoulders. The loose corduroys she wore untied easy to let him in. He thrust his hands deep. He fucked her hard with those thick, bent fingers. He talked, breathy and wild, his words lost in the noise of the fall. 

The whole of her back would scrape and bruise, she knew, from how he rutted on her. How he bore into her with his weight and shook. How she jerked and arched against the sharp rocks. 

No one said anything about them, where they'd been, what they did. Everybody gave them space and looked away. Maybe they thought this was how it had been, the whole damn time she was in Zion. Maybe they minded their business. Even Daniel kept his mouth shut, with Eddy at least. Though he stared at her strange now and again. Sometimes with kindness. Sometimes with a nosy pity. It wasn't charitable, but she guessed it wasn't cruel, either. 

  
\---

  
There was a place in the river, past the fall that marked the Narrows gate, where the water pooled over some open hole far below. The water flowed slow and sweet. Eddy could dunk herself full in and dive far as she could go, then float up to the top and bob like old driftwood. 

It was the best place in the valley when it got this hot. Hell, she sure wished there was anything like it outside. Out there, the water was sick with rads and lurks. Out there, wasn't much water to find. 

She spent a morning washing out her clothes, what was left of them. Scrubbed them on the rockbed with pulped yucca leaves. The green soap foamed between her fingers and sunk into the worn holes she should've patched up. Rinsed and wrung out, she lay them flat on a boulder to dry in the sun. If one of those wild dogs didn't make off with any of her underpants, she'd mark it a successful venture. 

Then she went at her own self. She smashed the root from the same yucca and lathered it up. Dug between her toes, all her filthy cracks caked up with dust. She hadn't done this near enough, and the opportunity was ever available. It felt good to get clean. The yucca soap soaked into her hair and she raked her scalp, ran it through to the ends. She took a bunched up pile of creosote leaves and scrubbed under her arms, down her back. The scent of it drifted up and over—like ponderosa pines in the rain. Like Zion. 

She hit the water feet first and shot down. The valley disappeared, nothing but blurs and bubbles. 

They'd given her a few things from the Sorrows stash, so when she crawled out and shook off the water, when she squeezed what she could out of her hair, she put it on. Well. It was enough to cover her bits, anyhow, but only just. Soon enough, she saw the benefit. There wouldn't be any peeling off and hiking up in the heat. No need. Joshua told the truth when he said the tribes were smart people. 

Wet hair dripping, she wiped her glasses dry on what she could grab of the bottoms, left her clothes, and searched for him. 

It didn't take long. He was in Angel Cave, bent over his table, dismantled firearms spread around him in a hundred shiny, oily pieces. A familiar sight. But they were _her_ firearms. 

Joshua raised his head when he heard her steps, then his narrowed eyes looked her up and down. Twice. Slowly, he asked, "Where are your clothes?"

She lifted the high stool from the reloading bench over to his desk and perched upon it. "I washed 'em. What are you doing with my guns?"

An uncertain _hmm_ escaped him. He stared at the wet trail of her hair. "Blessed is the man that endureth temptation," he muttered. Not so quiet she couldn't hear, and know what he meant. If he'd been tempted by her, if he was right now? Oh, he'd given in already, given all he had to her. She ached from it even as she wanted more. 

"I test fired them," he told her, "to see what repairs may be necessary. This rifle pulls a few yards to the left." His hand fell on the carbine's barrel, the sights unscrewed. "You don't mind, do you?" 

She searched the table, leaning over to sort through the pieces. "No, but—"

"Not the 9mm," he said. "I know. It's in your pack." They shared a look and she didn't have to say anything else. He understood her. 

Joshua turned the knob on the camp lantern. It clicked and buzzed. The desk brightened. He worked on setting the brass safety parts, so small between his fingers. "You may have heard. They've sent a party to the refuge, to bring home the other Sorrows. If all goes well, they will return within the month. And Daniel..." He hooked the spring into the catch. "He waits for word from our tribe. He will want to join them once the Sorrows are settled." 

"Are you—" Her wet hair chilled her. "You going back with him?"

He was quiet. He set down the catch and lifted an oily rag from the far corner of his desk. "I have asked the Lord where I may serve Him best." 

"He ain't answered you yet?" It wasn't a challenge. She kept her voice gentle. She wanted to know.

There was a sad smile in his eyes when he turned to her. "Not yet."

Her eyes blurred over his work. Her stomach felt like a cave, hollow and black. Could be, hurtful as it was to ponder, he _should_ go back. Try to get some of that life he should have had. Could be that was best for him. 

Better than hightailing it away again, to live the kinda life some poor, dumb homesteader like her thought was proper—a broke-down shack in the dirt, nobody and nothing but themselves for miles. Just because that's how _she_ came up, and it hadn't been a pretty picture. It was like a card flipped over and she saw the face of it. What she really wanted. She wanted to fix it with him. But you can't fix what's been set like that. Like a broken bone healed crooked. 

Her fingers curled around the rusty edge of the stool seat. In the cave, they were all they needed, but forever? Eddy never needed much. Didn't want much. Never got much. Not in the way of family or love or plain company. Sure, life had changed these past couple of years—she had a little of it and she was damn grateful. 

But Joshua had grown up in a tribe. Built himself another one to live in for years, foul as it might have been. Maybe he needed people to care for, to build for and lead. Maybe he needed more than her, even if she was what he said he wanted. 

"I only know," he said, tripping the safety with a flick of his thumb, "that I will wait to hear from you. Wherever I am." 

He said it like it was final. Like it was the most important thing. The thing that outweighed the rest. It had been a while now since she trusted him with her life. That was simple. Now he had everything else—the hard thing that thumped back of her ribs, the mushy nothing that dreamed about him at night. She trusted him with it all. It didn't matter whether he was a good man. Maybe it never had, to her, deep down. He was _this_ man. He was hers. 

She sat back on the stool and watched him work. It was nice to sit quiet beside him, while he wiped the sideplates and reset the pins. He was good at it. Clean and fast. The New Canaanites were gunsmiths from before the war, he'd told her. It was one of their trades. She imagined he must have done it, maybe been forced to do it, as a kid, over and over, until he got this good. It was odd how steady those kid things carried through your whole life. Like how she could still strip a network panel blind on her belly in the dark. Like how that rad waste she dug through still gave her aches and sickness sometimes. 

Mama said if she lived past ten, the sick wouldn't bother her none. Well. Eddy kept living.

"You sure are better at this than me," she said.

Joshua nodded in agreement. No point being shy about it, she figured. Pride may be a sin but this was a plain fact. "For example, I believe you bent this sight the last time you tightened the screws." He raised the rifle barrel to show her. Hell, she couldn't see the curve in it. "As I've said, we each have our gifts." 

"You said mine were... finer than yours." She leaned over and picked through the pins until he pushed her hand away with a huff. 

"Yes, I said that." He lifted the barrel to his face and checked the sight, one eye shut. 

When he didn't speak further, only eyed that sight and nudged it gentle with one finger, she laughed under her breath. "Well, go on, then." 

He set down the part and looked at her, the tight skin around his eyes crinkled. "You truly want me to list your fine qualities out to you? Like a child eager for praise?"

"Sure do. Never got much praise before you." She bit her lip and smiled. 

That bandaged head shook, exasperated, but he was smiling, too. She knew what his smile was now even with those on. In her mind, they weren't there. She didn't know when she would see that face free of gauze again. But she had the picture inside her, held tight.

The metal chair he sat in banged an echo out through the cave when he turned it toward her. His hands fell into his lap, fingers curled against his thighs the way they'd been the first time she saw him. He took a breath before he spoke. 

"Your will is so powerful, it nearly frightens me. But it inspires me more. You fight when it is time for fighting, and you know when to walk away. You aren't afraid of either action. You aren't afraid of anything. Except, perhaps, for bridges and cliffs." 

She opened her mouth to argue but he raised his open palm to her. _Quiet now._

"You see things clearly. Metaphorically speaking, of course," he said with a nod to her glasses. "You have a kind heart, even if you don't believe so. And though it's hardly of consequence," he said sharply, and his eyes followed the line of her body, lingered over her damp neck and chest, "I find you quite lovely to look upon." 

Once, here in this cave, he'd listed out to her the ways they were the same. All their dark parts, the cracks in their souls that were common between them. She wanted him to stop then. Stop before he dug too deep and found the black pit inside her, the shame and broken reckoning, because she knew it must be in him, too. 

Now, hearing how he loved her, and had loved her since then, because he'd shown that love in what he'd done and said since—she wanted him to stop again. Stop before it overwhelmed that heart he thought was so kind. 

He tilted his head at her silence. "Is that enough to satisfy an eager woman?"

Eddy blinked away a hot tear and folded her arms tight, her eyes settled on a black corner of the cave floor. "You think all that about me?"

The chair scratched the cave floor. He stood, and took her shoulders in his warm, heavy hands. "I thought I was rather poor at hiding it." 

She wanted to say something, say anything, but nothing came out. She fiddled with the snaps on his vest. 

"Perhaps I was wrong," he said. He thumbed her chin up to look at him. "You can't see a damned thing." 

He lifted the glasses from her face and set them gently among the scattered gun parts. She dragged the gauze from his mouth. He bent to kiss her, his thick, hard fingers in her hair, his bandaged palm stroking her thigh. 

The stool beneath her creaked when she opened her legs and let him in close. The guns on the desk rattled. The cave echoed. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Joshua quotes the book of James—_Blessed is the man that endureth temptation_—but I think Eddy has the right of it there.
> 
> You may notice I've bumped up the total chapter number by one. This one grew a little too long so I split it down the middle. More chapters aren't a bad thing, right? What we have here is, dare I say it, vaguely fluffy. 
> 
> Thank you for reading, as always. I hope everyone is well <3


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Super quick heads up on chronology, to be extra clear: 
> 
> Because I dated the original flashback chapters against "Now" (meaning That One Very Special Night), the flash forward chapters are also dated against "Now" (which is now "then"). So "Five days after" is five days on from That Night, not from the last chapter. 
> 
> Please indulge me. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

_—Five days after—_

  
Datura dotted the flatlands, clumped in patches, leaves curled and browning. Eddy yanked them by the roots from the loose, dry soil and set them in one of the Sorrows' grass baskets. White Bird wouldn't tell her what to do with the soft white flowers, the knotted roots. Wouldn't reveal to her how to keep from going sick, from dying, if you ate any of those pretty petals. That was all right. She wasn't picking these plants for anybody she liked.

Summer spent time baking all the daturas and the manzanitas and the mullein in the valley. Summer was moving on. So was she.

That night was going to be the last. Eddy told Joshua it had to be. Because it had to be sometime. 

He didn't argue or ask her to change her mind, but there was a hard ache burning off him she could feel, a begging question in his eyes whenever he looked her way. So he stopped looking at her so much the rest of the day. He'd get close, close enough to hold her—yes, now in front of everybody. To brush his hand through her hair. To breathe against her. She wasn't sure which hurt worse, seeing him that way, or feeling it so strong it was like being choked to death. 

It always came down to two choices. This was stay, or go. Funny thing was, she wasn't so fearful anymore, of what waited in the Mojave. Of the tasks she had in mind. Didn't know if it was just him that made her stronger. Or more like knowing deep in her mind what she had to lose now. That might have worried somebody else, but Eddy didn't like to lose, and she would do anything to keep from it. Everyone she loved scattered over the Mojave, or clumped up in the 38, if they were there—they belonged to her, a little. Zion belonged to her. Joshua was hers. There was enough in the world to prop her up, make her bigger than she was. Big enough to do the job. 

The tasks ahead would need it. Joshua didn't want to hear about it, not the details, not the goals. Whether he was hiding all his nerves from her, for her, or it hurt him to go back to that tactical frame of mind, he never gave a clear sign. _I beg you,_ he whispered, his bare lips brushing the corner of hers, _speak of anything else._ Oh, he didn't have to beg, but she'd never ask him to stop. She guessed she wouldn't want to hear, either, if she was in his boots. He trusted her, he said, to do what was right. What she thought was necessary. That she _could_ finish anything she put her mind and her gun to. 

"The Mojave and its sins are not my world any longer. It never truly was," he said. It irked her, and she told him so. But in a way, she wished she could feel the same. She wished that one day she would. 

She wanted to be what Joshua was now. Through with it all. Didn't want to hunt anymore. Didn't want to hurt people. One last fight, though, and they deserved it. They deserved everything she could throw. Revenge might have killed Joshua. Not his body, mind you—she couldn't imagine one thing on this earth that could finish that job. No, his spirit, his soul. But it wouldn't kill hers.

Especially if he was out there, waiting for her to come back to him. 

So Eddy found herself one last time at the Sorrows camp. One last meal of mesquite roast fish and peppers, one last high fire. One last night by the singing river. 

The others knew she was leaving, word had spread, but there was no stilted ceremony or going away get-together. She was thankful for it. Waking Cloud was in White Bird's cave, sweating out a scout with a fever, plying him with willow tea. Daniel was in and out. Helping, though not too much. Wanting to be involved, but not get in the way. It seemed like his natural state—a waver, one way, then the other. 

People came and went. Life went on through the night. Only she and Joshua stayed put by the fire, eating charred barrel fruit and listening to the low wind. They sat quiet and close. The stars were dim that night, muted by a bright, full moon.

There was labored breathing and hard steps at the edge of the camp. Daniel walked into the firelight, hat in hand, and mopped the sweat from his brow with a kerchief. He scooped a scrap of fish from the rock grill. "Fever's broken," he said, his mouth full.

"Sure glad to hear it." Eddy slid her hand away from where it hid in the crook of Joshua's thigh. She felt him let out a breath. 

"They're keeping him so White Bird can magic him with that incense of his. I stink of it now." Daniel pinched his shirt away from his chest. "But Waking Cloud is a capable healer. He should be fine." 

"God willing," Joshua said, wiping his hands on his pants. 

Daniel gave him that look he saved only for Joshua. A wary challenge, a healthy dose of respect and fear. "Of course. The Lord has aided us so far. And He reminds me even tonight that perhaps I, too, should be on my way," he said. He cut his eyes to Eddy. 

Nobody said anything to that, so he went on. "Waking Cloud will have her other wise women, and what knowledge I've imparted upon her. I feel God's hand guiding me away from this place. Our brothers and sisters are hard at work in the north. And we do not even know where yet." 

Joshua folded his arms, tight. "Must we speak of this tonight?" 

Daniel shrugged and swigged from a canteen. "If you would rather not, I will hold my tongue on that subject. For now. But I would ask to speak with you, courier. Alone."

Eddy had never spoken to him alone. Not once. She never knew him very well. Part of her was sorry for it, and part of her didn't like him much. "Okay," she muttered, and pushed herself up from the ground. 

"Whatever is in your heart, brother, you are free to speak it here." Joshua stared at Daniel. The words were kind, but he said them with a hard edge.

It did not give Daniel one bit of pause. He didn't even spare another of those looks for Joshua. He stood waiting for Eddy. So she followed him out along the water, along the moonbright bank, out to where the crackling fire was a faraway hiss drowned out by the river. 

There, all Daniel did was gaze into the river, the water glittering in the moonlight. Eddy dumped her hands deep in her pockets and rocked back and forth on her heels. 

"May I speak freely with you?" he asked.

"Guess so," she told him, not knowing why anybody wouldn't.

When he faced her, his lips were tight. His whole face was scrunched up beneath that black hat. "Why are you leaving Joshua now?" Before she could even open her mouth to answer, he jumped in again. "And I mean, why _now,_ when his soul needs your presence most?" 

She had no god damned clue what he was talking about. She sputtered stupidly, but he cut her off. 

"You've tempered him. _You."_ He pointed at her, his sharp, bony finger leveled at her face like the long barrel of a .44. "You did what none of his New Canaanite family could do. What the Lord himself seemed content to let slip by," he said gesturing into the air.

This is what she'd thought Daniel was like all the time. Holding everything in until it blew up. Thinking he knew what was what, without ever asking for the truth. Because whatever he thought about Joshua was not what she knew. "It ain't me," she insisted. "He did that himself. He changed." 

He sighed and shook his head, his eyes shut. "I've known him longer than you have. And I fear that when you walk out of this canyon," he said, "the old Joshua will take his place. For his sake alone, I don't want that." 

She saw the trouble in his clear blue eyes. They trembled and bore into her. "I didn't know you cared so much about him," she said. 

"Of course I do." That sharp tone he had didn't feel caring, but she guessed it was his way. "He is my brother in the Lord. I care about his soul, and yours."

Her stomach twisted. She wanted to walk away, back to that fire and Joshua. Forget all the hemming and hawing of what someone else thought was best for them. 

"I'm—" The words stuck. "I'm not leaving him forever." 

Daniel studied her. "So you _are_ going to join us at the new settlement soon?" 

_No._ The thought jumped up in her. _Hell, no._ That wasn't what she wanted. That wasn't her lonely farmhouse for the two of them. Could she even dream it up? Joshua hardly fit among them—he said so himself, and they were his tribe. She'd be like a yao guai at the dinner table. All claws and bared teeth. Smashing all the dishes. But Daniel would never grasp on that. "You yourself don't even know where they are," she said. 

"I will take that as a no." His voice pointed at her, like that finger of his. "I pray you reconsider. Wherever it may be, we need him. He may not stay without you." 

So that was it. She had to give him the courtesy of believing what he said. That he did care for Joshua's soul. Hers, too. That this wasn't a selfish bargain to do what he thought might benefit the New Canaanites most, to the exclusion of everybody else in the world. Even if that's how it sounded, and how it felt. 

And she knew, like she felt that hard turn in her belly, she had that same idea. To take Joshua away from them, from the world and keep him, in the little house by the creek that was every bit a mystery as the New Canaanite land. That she was just as bad, just as selfish. 

"Joshua's gonna do what he needs to do," she said. "And so am I. That's all I can tell you." 

His jaw set hard. "And that means running off to the Mojave, to kill more people? Do you truly think this world needs more war?" 

There was so much Daniel would never understand, not only because he didn't care to. They were some of the things Joshua himself was content to keep out of his mind. These New Canaanites, they shut their eyes and their hearts too damn tight. 

"World's already got war," she told him. "Maybe it needs some help since the Lord is staying out of things. You know, God let Joshua build the Legion. God let them run wild, let the whole Mojave and everywhere else burn and suffer, and for what?"

That damn heat and anger flashed through her, try as she might to stamp out those flames. "Seems like God let a lot of things slip by. I won't." 

He stared at her, silent, quizzical, and then he laughed under his breath. There was not a bit of humor in it. "You're just like him, you know that?"

That idea was not a new one for her. Whether Daniel meant it as a compliment or condemnation, she didn't care. "I guess I do."

He nodded to her. "I'll be praying for you." 

His slow steps crunched the gravel shore, off into the moonlit dark along the river. Eddy crouched to the water, dipped her hands among the cool stones. It soothed her. She wet her face, her neck, and wiped it dry, slowing her breath.

Back at the fire, Joshua had been waiting, and patient as he looked she knew he was stirred up. His hands were perched stiff on his knees, he watched her approach with hard eyes. "And what did Daniel have to tell you that I could not hear?" He kept his voice light. He was so damn bad at acting like he didn't care.

What could she say? _Daniel loves you but he doesn't trust you. He doesn't care if the rest of the world rots, like you said to me. You New Canaanites think you're not part of this awful world but you are, you motherfuckers, you are._

"Nothing much," she told him. "That he was gonna pray for me." 

"That, he will do." He seemed satisfied, since he knew what Daniel was like. 

She sat down beside him, the worn ridges of her corduroy pants brushing up against the patched and frayed denim of his jeans. They didn't used to sit so close. Now nothing seemed close enough. 

His hand gripped hers tight, until he patted her arm and let go. He went to dig around for something behind the slat huts. The sky grew darker around that moon. In her eyes, it fuzzed at the edge, like a pill dissolving in a black puddle. 

He came back, lowering himself beside her, a bunch of little pains and soft grunts he tried to hide. A creaky old man. She memorized every sound. 

He set a small thing in her lap. It was his scripture book.

"Take it with you," he said. His brow turned with that worried crease. "As long as you have this, I know you will be on your way to return it to me." 

A hard, dark line of cold ache cut her open, from her head to her gut. Her eyes blurred from it. "You shouldn't." 

"I want to."

There was no arguing with him. Like her, he got what he wanted. If she had a piece of him she could onto, that might make it all easier.

She picked it up and turned it over in her hands, felt the pebbled leather worn smooth, like that belt of his she'd held onto so many times now. The soft edge of the pages slid across her fingertips when she began to turn them. But he closed her hand in his around the book, and set it in the dust beside them. 

He leaned into her shoulder, his face so near her own she felt him breathe through the gauze. "I have more to confess to you," he whispered, "while I still have you." 

She grazed his neck with her fingers, stroking along his shoulder. "You can say anything you want to me."

There was a throaty groan in his sigh, when his head fell soft against hers. "Despite how— how drawn to you I was, part of me prayed you would leave. Quickly. In those early days. I wanted you near and yet I wished you gone. Wished you were anyone else."

He couldn't be feeling guilty about that. How silly. How foolish. How stupid everything was between them before— was it even a week ago? She ran a finger along his jawline.

"You were a mirror for me," he said, "and I did not want to look. The longer I knew you, learned what life bid you do to survive... Nothing has ever made me regret so strongly what I used to be." 

He gripped her shoulder tight and looked into her eyes. 

"I thought it was Caesar who made me what I was. It was not. I chose it, all of it." His eyes were wet, frantic. "Apologies are useless. I cannot undo anything. And I see you now and I know I don't deserve your love. But beast that I am, I will take it anyway. I will grow stronger and more terrible for it. So will you. And I don't even fear it." 

She thought about that first time they spoke. He talked about his purpose. She thought he was crazy then. Maybe he was. And if he made sense to her now, a deep kind of sense she couldn't put into words that sounded any less crazy? He made her bigger, she felt that. His love gave her power, and it went both ways. That was what he meant. She understood him. 

The deserving, though. The guilt that trailed behind him like a dust cloud, dirtying everything. Maybe all that dust was part of Zion. And they'd both leave it behind one day.

"Nobody deserves anything," she said, sweet and soft as she could muster. She felt along where his lips were under the gauze. "We just get what we get."

He blinked away the wet and shook his head. "That can't be. There is a balance set in Heaven. But we..." He took her face in his hands. "We cannot read the scale." 

Really, that was two ways of saying the same thing, wasn't it? Two sides of that mirror he talked about. One was dusty, it softened everything. The other was clear, but cracked and sharp. Either side, you saw yourself, like she'd seen herself in his eyes that first time. She should have known then what would come. But finding it along the way was better, in the end. 

She kissed the gauze-covered mouth. He breathed deeply. She took the scripture book in one hand, and the collar of his shirt in the other. He followed her to the hide beds. They were alone, strangely alone, with only the fire and the moon to watch them.

  
\---

  
She set the Pip-Boy to wake her well before dawn. The beeps shook her mind out of a fitful, light sleep. Everything seemed noisy. Her body wouldn't rest. It was a comfort to have Joshua's hands upon her, to feel his breath on her neck, hear his snores. But she'd barely slept the whole night. It was foolish nerves. It was a rebellion. Maybe one more night would be enough to rest up to walk on. Maybe one more... But every night she planned to be the last would've been like this. Twitchy. Unsettled. 

Nothing would be settled until it was all through in the Mojave. And that had to happen as fast as possible. So she could get back to him. 

Next to her, he rolled onto his back and sighed. She let him stay as long as he wanted to lie down, but soon enough he was up, like her, grunting his way to standing and back into the cave. There was nothing left to do. She'd gathered everything the day before. All her guns, shiny and fixed up, clothes and extra food. Her Followers coat, that old straw cowboy hat. Daniel's maps. Herbs from Waking Cloud, daturas and agave. A beaded necklace Follows-Chalk had given her once. The scripture book. 

Joshua walked out of the cave with her pack. It was light, easy to strap on over her flannel shirt and set on her back. He had nothing but his holstered gun and a dark stare. He wanted to walk with her, he said, as long as he could. 

She wouldn't stop him, though it might have been wiser. 

They hiked with the map, though he seemed to know the way well enough. It was a low, rocky trek south around the biggest boulders. The canyon bottomed out and widened ever further, so the mountains were green hills, and the Virgin was shallow and quiet. 

They were quiet, too. He would set a warm hand upon her back, dust his fingers across her neck when they stopped for water. Oh, how she wanted to hold him. Drop to the ground right there at the river basin and make a new home wherever they fell. Down among the mossy rocks. Down among the summer flowers. 

They kept walking. She half-dreamed he wouldn't stop, and wherever she went he'd be beside her, around to the Long 15. Beside her clipping into Legion Arizona. Beside her cutting through the Nevada desert. 

But they reached a point where the path ahead was obvious—flat and brown and wide and westward. All the green was behind them, in the canyon valley. All the life and things she'd come to know. 

She turned to him. He blinked at her. Like a cat. 

She said what she'd never said aloud to him. "You could come with me. Start over new."

The cat eyes grew tense. Worried. "I've started over twice already. I cannot come. For so many reasons." 

She knew he would say no. But it was in her to ask. She needed to. Like it was in her to ask for one more thing—no. Not to ask. To tell. To say plain and clear what she wanted. A demand from him, after he'd given her so much. Well. She supposed they were even by now, though she felt so deep in his debt. Maybe that's another thing love felt like: the giving and getting in an endless exchange. 

"I want to see you again," she said, grabbing his hands tight. 

"You will." No hesitation. No hedging. No negotiation. If he said it was so, it must be so. She trusted him. His hold on her hands was sure.

Then there was nothing left to do but walk away. 

She turned, but his hard hand gripped her shoulder. It pulled her back around to him. 

The bandages were clear of his mouth. He kissed her softly. Chastely. His lips drifted toward her cheek, and he kissed her again. 

"God will be with you," he whispered. 

She let herself breath against his lips once more. The want clawed and screamed. A quick, hungry kiss to stop herself from crying out. Then she nodded and turned, her pack swinging. A quick march out of the valley. Away from it all. Away from him, for now. 

She didn't look back. 

If the things Joshua said were true, God _would_ be with her. She would be doing God's work.

  
\---

  
Eddy hiked back to the Long 15 in a blur. Wasn't hungry, wasn't tired. She was in a single-minded hurry. She cut through wilderness and nothing forever. Sometime she looked up at the sky and remembered the world was big and small in equal measure. Sometime she blinked her eyes awake and saw a few beat-up shacks sat along the road. Just like back home. That meant she was in podunk nowhere. The kind of place you leave quick as you can.

A little dust bowl of a town had a bar. Half a bar. The other half of the place was smashed in, crumbled, like some deathclaw played jump rope on it. But there was enough to serve up sarsparillas and whiskey, enough of a roof to pay a few caps to sleep under. Next morning, she slumped on a stool and drank coffee, ate eggs. Neither of them tasted like anything. 

A sun-beaten old man with a red kerchief around his neck dumped a splintered crate on the bar. "Got your things from Mesquite, Bill," he called to the bartender. "Couple letters, too." 

Eddy pushed her eggs away. "Where you headed, sir?" 

"Straight to Vegas, my girl. Got a wagon come from Legion country. Safe as kittens. Need a ride? Gets lonely on that long road." He untied the kerchief and wiped his forehead, smiling.

She shook her head. "You got paper and pen? I need to write a letter." 

The smile fell flat. "50 caps for the supplies and the sending."

She scratched out two notes. All either of them said was that she was alive, and she was on her way. One, she told the caravan man, should go to the Lucky 38, that the robot out front would get it inside. The other to the Old Mormon Fort. Arcade would be at one of them. Maybe it was stupid to imagine any of them waiting on her, hanging around for four months when she might never come back. When she might be dead. 

She only hoped to see them again. See them alive and well, before she went to Fortification Hill. 

After she paid the man for his trouble and threw in a couple bottles for a bonus, she squared up with Bill the bartender, too, and walked into the sun. The old man's wagon was hitched and moving, the brahmin driving up dust on the road. She watched it truck away. Painted glossy and new on the back was a big, red bull. 

A couple more blurry days and she was close to Vegas. People knew who Eddy was in these parts, but it was by name, or reputation, truthfully earned or tall tale. Hardly a soul knew her by sight. She blended in easy, floppy old cowboy hat slung low on her eyes, filthy as anybody who trekked across the territory like she had. 

Wasn't until she passed another cowboy hat, this one stumbling drunk over broken concrete in Freeside, that somebody recognized her. 

"Well, I'll be fucked. You did come back, after all." 

Cass dragged her back to the Strip by her arm. Everybody else was in the High Roller Suite, waiting. Everybody. 

Arcade looked so clean and bright. He hugged her, gentle, and gave her a worried look, a hundred questions in his eyes. Veronica and Lily yelled hello. The other ED-E beeped and spun. She kissed Raul on his scarred cheek. Rex jumped up and did the same to her—gave her a big lick, cut clean through the dirt on her face. 

Boone held her tight, so tight she couldn't hardly breathe. She thought she heard him sniffle. _What a baby,_ she thought, stroking his soft, red hair. 

Veronica and Cass yanked her into the kitchen. They'd laid out the table quick—frosty colas, full bottles of whiskey, and more Fancy Lads than she could count. Cass wrapped her arm around Eddy and squeezed. "Let's make this celebrational!"

It was all laughing and crosstalk, wild and giddy. It was better than she hoped for. She put on a smile and joked with the rest of them. She hid away that dark part inside her, that cold, ashy pile that waited to be set aflame again. The waiting would be long. It would make her sick if she let it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eddy wouldn't have seen it, so it's not in the story, but Joshua stood there watching her walk away from the valley until he couldn't see her any longer. Then he sat at that spot, for hours, until dark. 
> 
> Thank you for reading. Thank you for the comments and kudos. I honestly can't say how much I love and appreciate you all. <3 <3


	16. Chapter 16

_—Four months after—_

Those days, Eddy never could get warm enough in the Mojave anymore. Season shifted, summer was over, and the sun shone cold and thin through greasy clouds. The sand scraped you raw when the wind threw it at you. The air was like a too-tight jumpsuit, hard to move around in, stiff on your skin. 

Everything in Utah had been easy on her bones, on her eyes. She got used to the green and red and looked for it everywhere, but there wasn't any. There were withered, scattered, brown gourds. There were dried-up creekbeds of cracked dirt and half-dead cactus slumping pitiful onto the ground. 

What grew plentiful were the Joshua trees. Before, they were desert decoration, hardly worth more notice than a big rock. A damn sight less useful for gunfire cover. Now, they followed her everywhere, with that name. Now, she saw him in them. Tall and hard and scarred with age. Standing patient through the strong winds. Waiting.

  
\---

  
Eddy held onto that Legion coin necklace the dog boy gave her for so long she didn't even know where it was. Once, she had a notion to tear the coin from the rope and skip it across Lake Mead. See if she could hit a lurk. Let it sink into the dark, oily water, the way she wished the whole Legion would. Just fall off that hill fort and drown. 

But she hadn't done that, and neither had they. It was locked up in her bedroom desk at the 38, in a drawer full of old junk. Sitting there, shiny.

A couple days after she got back to Vegas, she dug it out and held it by the rope. It wobbled from one ugly side to the other, the silver bull swinging by its horns.

"Et tu, mi amica?" 

It was Arcade's voice behind her. He shadowed the doorway, hands deep in the frayed pockets of that old Followers coat. "Thinking of joining the Legion after all?" he said with a crooked smile. 

She nodded slow, and gave him a long look. "Yeah. I am." 

His smile went funny. "Wh-what?"

Even after she'd wrangled everyone up to the grimy, silent cocktail lounge, even after she'd told them straight what she wanted to do, Arcade was still sputtering mad. 

"This isn't a plan. It isn't even an _idea."_ He paced a streak on the broken tiles around the bank of white couches, where the rest of them sat. 

Eddy slumped back into the cushions. "You're right, I don't have a plan. But we got a way inside. We can pick it apart from in there. If Caesar dies, the rest of it dies." 

"You're rushing in to see if you can figure it out before _you_ die. Horribly. And why am I even surprised by that?" He was talking to himself now, like he did, but he looked to Veronica and Raul for some kind of backup. Raul shrugged. 

Veronica pushed back her hood and folded her hands calmly. "What makes you think we can do this?" she asked Eddy. 

"They got a weakness," Eddy said. "We won't find it until we get in there. It'll take time. Really it ain't that we _can_ do it. We have to." 

"Alone?" Arcade pinched above his glasses. "This is suicide."

"Not going in there guns cocked and blasting. NCR's pissing in the sand for now. We got time to... infiltrate. Before they want war." Eddy sat up straight and let out a hard breath. "They want to see me? I'll let 'em." 

"Uh." Raul leaned forward, one patchy finger in the air. "What about the slaves, boss? You gonna let them loose and have the Legion string you up? Or, you know, leave them to die horribly, like you?" 

He might have been around for long, dusty time, but Eddy didn't imagine Raul had ever been one to make his words soft. It was something she'd turned over in her mind the whole time, dark and heavy as lead. It was something she didn't have an answer for, and was fearful to say so. She swallowed. "We do what we can," was all she could tell him. 

There was a grumble and mess of noise from everybody. 

"She's right." Boone cut through the sound. He didn't have to raise his voice. It shut everybody up. "Some of them are Legion loyal. We've seen it. Some are—" You couldn't tell where he was looking behind those shades, but his mouth was tight. "We do what we can," he muttered. 

Nobody, not even Arcade, would argue with him about it. 

And that was the first of it, beyond the sharp thoughts rattling through Eddy's brain, half-shared with Joshua. Now it was set out loud. Now she had her help, disinclined as some of it might have been. 

It was a long con. Felt longer because the game was so hard, filled with cruelty and lies and turning so many blind eyes away. But this wasn't Eddy's first run at such a thing. She played to get at the brahmin rancher. Again with that checkerboard gangster. Over and over. She was an old hand at it by now. She knew what to do.

She hit the camp at Nelson first. They'd convinced her to start outside the Fort, build up her story—not march right up to Caesar and gladhand him until he was primed for a blow. She had a mess of NCR dog tags and a bunch of foolish lies about racking up kills. The boy they called Dead Sea, he was from up north Utah. New Canaanite country, thereabout. She didn't ask one thing about it. 

He stroked his sharp hair and fell for her stories, because it made his camp look strong. Caesar may not have been fond of women, but he liked volunteers. He liked fresh meat, they said. That didn't make sense to Eddy, how her doing what none of his Legionaries ever managed was a strength. But she'd counted on most of them being stupid, anyway. It was a relief she was right. 

Maybe the rest of the camp knew she'd bested them. Maybe that's why they were so foul to her, even while she did their work, or claimed to. _Profligate,_ they called her. _Scortum._ And she smiled all the while, even when Arcade told her what it meant. 

  
\---

  
Vegas was bleak like the desert. The lights on the Strip buzzed endless and white. Everything was steel and concrete, rusted and crumbling. The colors were cold. 

Vegas wasn't home. Didn't matter that she had a soft bed of her own, that she kept her meager cache of junk and guns locked up in that tower. Didn't matter that she had the run of the 38 for herself and the friends she loved. Wasn't home. Her home and her heart were with him now, she knew. 

Zion was wild and rare. It had a bright heat. It soaked into her skin and moved her blood. But Zion probably never was a homestead for them. It was always a place to be, then leave, for the both of them. She wondered—always she wondered, her mind never settled straight on the raw dark now—if she would ever see it again. If he would be there, or somewhere new she hadn't yet seen. 

She would call for him somehow, and find him. On that she was confident, because it had to be so. Then they would make that home together. The thought kept her breathing.

There were places in the world that weren't Vegas nor Zion. 

There was a patch down south she'd wandered once, when she ran around with that sweet ghoul boy. Empty and lonely and wide, it had been. There was a hot spring right off I-10, a smudge of settlers in squat houses. Farther east, farther into the sand, there were orange boulders and chollas and wildflowers, and then? Flat nothing, nothing but Joshua trees and sky. 

The signs said that's what they called it in the old days, back when they weren't too clever with names. Joshua Tree. It sounded funnier to her now. It was two and a half days' hike east of the Boneyard. Three days south from Vegas. 

She got to thinking about it. 

Vegas and Freeside needed more Followers. They needed to stay free, and they would, if she could help it. But Vegas would always be Vegas, and the NCR wouldn't let go their hold even if she asked real sweet, no matter what happened to the Legion. Joshua Tree could be more than a hideout. It could be another independent town, a trade settlement like the New Canaanites wanted. But part of things. Another Library for the Followers, bulked up against the Legion and everything they held east. Or what would be left of them when she was through.

It was a good spot to set up for people who needed it. Needed that access to cities north and west, needed the room to work and trade. 

Eddy didn't. Didn't even want it. She wanted that lonely little house somewhere. She wanted one man to share it with her. 

  
\---

  
She sent Boone back to Novac, until it was time. She wouldn't put him through it. Not Cass nor Victoria, neither. They could handle themselves, no doubts about that, but it was too risky a play. Too many corners to watch. 

She _felt_ the Legionaries eyeball her when, dusty and wrecked as she might be, over and over she strolled through their camps, free as she pleased. They seethed. It was hatred, with a sour yellow pitch of lust in it. The slave women cursed her practiced, satisfied smiles. One spat at her feet and got the whip for it. Eddy didn't blame her one bit. She'd have done the same fucking thing. She'd have done a lot worse.

Arcade was who she needed. She needed him to speak their language. She needed him to make the medicines they asked for, like he'd done at the Mormon Fort. She needed him to be human and kind and the one person she could hold onto. 

And each time her Legion errands got her sliced up or shot, he was right there to drag her to safety, and tell her she was crazy. _Who's crazier,_ she asked him, slugging whiskey, woozy from pain, while he stitched up her arm on a rusty table, _me for doing it or you for going along with me?_

_You, by far_, he said, and cut the suture thread. He snatched the bottle from her hand and dumped the liquor onto her cut. She coyote yelped and slapped the table.

But the con played out. God truly did provide. Whatever Joshua tried to make of them long ago, the Legion were fools. 

They loved her lies and her crappy evidence for them. They loved that she was a wastelander who came when they called, like one of their growling, mangy hounds. That decanus at Techatticup, he watched her ignore the troopers he stuffed in cages. Curtis the spy believed her when she said _True to Caesar_ and let him blow up whatever he wanted. The dog boy, he cracked a near-genuine smile when he asked if she desired more work, and she answered with grim grit and the words Arcade had spelled out for her—_Per angusta ad augusta._

One month in, they brought Eddy to Fortification Hill. 

She wrapped her arm around Arcade's and squeezed hard the whole soggy ride across the river. Her guts pitched right along with the boat. What if she'd got it all wrong? What if they were riding to their deaths, and all this had been for nothing? If she never saw Joshua again? Arcade squeezed her back, and nudged into her with his wide shoulder. She took it for encouragement. Maybe he only wanted to push her out of the boat.

The Fort sat hard and bare atop a high, wide plateau. It was a stark climb up with nothing to hold onto. They'd cleared the hill of every green thing, every bit of life, so that all was left was sand and sweat and red tents. The camp was a streak of blood in the dust. 

The slaves there worked and walked under the thin, pale sunlight, silent as ghosts. She tried not to look. But more than one watched her with defeated, cloudy eyes, and she stared at their faces, lined with markings dark and beautiful. Like Follows-Chalk. Her heart twisted up hoping he was safe, somewhere far. That she wouldn't see him here in rags. Remembering how she feared at first that Joshua might have been taking the Zion tribes to the Legion, when he'd done all he could to keep them away. 

She began to map the layout, to stash it in her brain. The paths down the hill were steep but open. No locks, no gates. Those enslaved people, they could walk. If it weren't for all the Legion's weapons, and their cruelty in using them. The Legion had mercy bred and beaten out of them. The old Joshua, who knew what mercy was, he must have known best how to kill it. He'd done it to himself.

The open paths were a test, she was sure. If one tried and failed, they'd be an example. At night, maybe, some could get away, slip through the dark and run. Then they faced Lake Mead. If they could swim past the lurks, if they could make it to Callville Bay... 

A hard hand gripped her arm. A bearded guard. He hauled her into the shadow of a row of tents. Arcade followed, at a distance. The guard shoved her stumbling against the dingy canvas, and adjusted his armored shoulders. He held his metal fist up, ready to strike. "You have recently come from the Utah. From Zion. Why were you there for so many months?" 

The question sent a freeze into her blood, but it was one she could hide. She'd expected they would know. Wasn't sure when they would ask. She put on a dopey, nothing-to-hide, nothing-between-the-ears face. "Caravaners all got killed the day we arrived. Except me. I couldn't get out the way I come. I got stuck hiding from tribals until I made another path." It wasn't all false. Truth was the easiest kind of lie to tell. 

His fist lowered. "What tribes?" 

"Well, they never gave me their calling card. Scary fuckers with white shit on their legs. And big guns." 

He didn't say anything. He weighed out her words with what he knew. Salt-Upon-Wounds might have sent word of her, and Joshua. The last of the other living White Legs might have, too. Her brain flipped over that night again. How the fires burned high all along their camp, and the singe of hide and human skin when they fell dead into the flames. How she took Joshua by the shoulders on that red cliffside where Salt-Upon-Wounds cowered, and stared into his eyes until he blinked away that blind rage. What if it had been better to let Joshua kill him, to kill them all? Would Zion be safer, if they'd done more—

"There were no... _civilized_ men there? Men from the wasteland?" The guard's eyes narrowed. 

If he knew, and it was a trap, she'd just have to gnaw her way out of it. "Not a one."

It seemed to be the answer he wanted. You could see his shoulders fall at ease, even in those big armored pads. "How many kills did you collect from among those savages?" he asked, near-cordial. 

"More than I could count." And that was another truth, cold and awful as it was. 

He nodded. "Mars smiles upon you."

She smiled right back. 

He marched her through the camp, to the main attraction, and ordered Arcade to wait blinking in the sun.

Caesar's tent, with all its thick, velvety curtains and gold totems, was full of other Legion boys. He kept the worst of the worst close at hand, all but that Monster they spoke of. A new legate, this one without a soul. _He_ would not fail them because he was not human. 

Legion soldiers talked about Joshua all the time, though not by name. They sniffed, haughty because they were still alive and they thought he wasn't. They told old stories, laughing, until they remembered he was part of the tale, so they shut up. 

It was the one thing that made her feel at ease, because she did the same thing. She couldn't name him. She told no one. She thought of him always. He was a wound that would not heal.

She saw Caesar himself. He didn't impress her much. 

After everything she heard, he disappointed. The old bastard was a lump on his rickety throne. And he looked old, acted old, smelled old. Nothing like Joshua, who was strangely ageless and strong and smelled like clean Zion air. 

Caesar summoned her to stand before him. She marched up without a pause. They told her she shouldn't meet his eyes. She stared at his lap. 

"Do you know the most perfect, most satisfying victory there is?" Caesar pushed bread and olives around on his hammered plate. He only pretended to eat. "To have your enemy come to you as a supplicant. To have convinced them they were wrong to oppose you through nothing but your own unwavering truth. It gives me a pleasure I no longer find in brutality." 

A snap of his fingers and someone offered him a bowl of water. He dipped his hands in and wiped them on his skirt. His scrawny white knees flashed. The plate was full. The olives rolled. 

"It has happened over and over for me. Yet this time I am reminded of its sweetness, because you have been such a thorn in my paw. A courier I never captured. A bumbling hick bent on, what? Vigilante justice?" 

He leaned on one thin fist. The arm of the throne was sculpted bone in gold. 

"It was inevitable you would find your way to me. Any student of history would see it. Further, our soothsayers promised it would come to pass, and their promises always come true. You have a purpose in our world. I would see it fulfilled." 

Eddy bowed her head. She hoped the laughter she swallowed looked like some grand emotion, some grateful _thank you, sir. _

"I've set your tasks before you. I will not direct you a second time. Now, go. Do these things and you will be rewarded." He waved her off, distracted, squinting at nothing in the distance. 

She smiled her way to that underground bunker, carrying the chip that got her killed. And she smiled at what was inside. All those Securitrons. A bomb right under their feet. She only had to flip the switch.

  
\---

  
Every night she slept in her own too-large, too-empty room, in that cold bed, Eddy read Joshua's scripture book. 

She picked out the parts she remembered and studied them. She read new parts to herself, in his voice. Every shade of it, every color and shadow, was in her memory. She could hear him like he was in that bed with her—hear his shallow breathing, hear him humming or snoring. It eased her to sleep at night, imagining he was there, his body warm and heavy next to hers. 

In the book he hid a letter. Folded thin, wedged deep. She didn't find it for a month. He'd meant it to be that way.

After all the time they talked and grew closer, after those days together, the two of them, when talk was useless and she felt half-drunk just to touch his skin... there couldn't be much more to say that hadn't been said. But she'd never met another man whose words were as strong as his actions. Joshua's words were like his thick, bent fingers, his rough hands. They took hold of her and would not let go. They were more delicate than they had any right to be. 

_You were made in God's image, and you are sublime. Every scar, every inch of skin, every beat of your heart. It should not be such a wonder that my love for you feels like worship. _

_And yet I wonder at myself, and you. At how you accepted me, how you know my soul. You are all my faith and prayers rewarded. It is the only answer. _

_Although I cannot be with you now, I need you. My need for you is not a foolish lust disguised. My own heart no longer beats without an echo of yours. I will not truly breathe again until I feel your chest rise against mine. I will be on my knees before you, waiting._

Eddy was not a crier, by nature. By necessity. Nobody would run out of things to cry about if they opened their damn eyes and looked around for a minute, and what did it get you? A headache, a snot nose, and you looked like a fool. Never solved one problem in this world. 

That letter, though. Seeing the careful, curved writing he'd set there for her, forever. Reading his thoughts, clear and beautiful. Knowing that he loved her and he existed and here was the fucking proof—these thin, yellowed pieces of paper. 

Something broke in her when she read it. Some of that fearsome, violent want in her got loose. She'd been afraid of it, but maybe it was whipped back, satisfied while she schemed and worked. Maybe it peeked out of its cage. Here, in her bedroom, all it amounted to was a few silent, shaking sobs, a wet pillow. 

He told her to let him know when her work was finished. To send word to the Sorrows camp. They would deliver it to him if he was in Zion, and if he was not... They would deliver it. Wherever he may be. He told her he would wait, as long as it took. He'd said the same thing in Angel Cave. He never lied. 

She read the letter less than the book. She folded it even smaller, stitched a pouch for it from some leather scraps, punctured the pouch with a brass snap. That would protect it in her pocket, in her pack. She'd reach in and hold the pouch in her palm, run her finger along the ragged seam, repeat to herself the words inside. She started carrying it with her everywhere. Everywhere but the Fort. One of these days her scheme might flop. They might turn on her, and if they found that?

They'd torture her for lying and they'd kill her to hurt him. They'd go after him again, for winning Zion and ending the White Legs, for daring to pierce their veil once more with this pathetic plan. The plan, the acts—they were hers, not his. Wouldn't matter to them. And it wouldn't matter to Joshua. It would be another war, but Eddy was not afraid for his life, not anymore. Only his soul. 

She carried the letter, and she left the gun behind. It happened almost without her noticing. In the middle of anything else, it would flash to her: the gun wasn't in her pack. And that snap of fear left quick, because she could touch the letter. Or she'd see the gun when she opened the safe in her bedroom and think, _Oh. That._ It didn't bother her so much anymore to see it. She had _this_ to hold onto now. Something good worth remembering. Didn't need to claw onto the worst.

One night, while she twisted stiff in a sleeping bag under a cottonwood and a weak moon, she held the pouch to her chest and the words were there in her head: _God, if you're really there, protect him. Keep him safe. Help me do this and return to him._ A prayer, from her. She meant it, she guessed. Where else would it come from? 

But she laughed at herself, laughed at how surprised Joshua would be to hear it. Or not surprised at all, come to think of it. 

Her laugh echoed into the dark sky. Somewhere in the sand, a coyote barked an answer. 

  
\---

  
No matter how much armor somebody wore, how broad and hard their stance, how big a gun they held, how fucked-in-the-head fearless they might be—there was weakness in everybody. It took time and a clear head to spot it. When you did—_there,_ it flashed in your eye like sun off water. Then you couldn't see anything else. 

Caesar trusted no one. That was plain from how he would order one of his men low and calm, apart from the others, brow bent in serious, near fatherly concern, and send him away with a nod. Once the soldier was gone, he'd tell anybody nearby, _Watch him fuck up. He will._ It was a test for each of them. What was more important, seeing their Domine's plans through, or making him happy in the moment? It was both. Life in the Legion was a losing game. 

Caesar was sick. That was plain from the way he would twitch and sigh, grind his jaw and shake through the hurt. She wasn't old, but he looked the way she felt sometimes—strong one minute, weak the next. Tired and achy, shaky until you shook it out. Maybe that was only living. 

Arcade had a notion what was wrong with Caesar. Confirmed when the man himself asked her for technology he'd tossed the chance to use long ago. The rot in his soul got to his brain. 

That was one weakness spotted. He was dying. He was desperate. He demanded what he was owed from the broken, weak world outside—its medicine, its technology. And he did not trust a single one of his men to take care of him. 

This courier, though. Dumb and obedient, like a puny dog jumping for his attention. Oh, yes, she would fetch him anything he wanted and then some. The robot doc, stimpaks, sure. Maybe a new treatment. Eddy had some notions herself on that. 

In the meantime, Caesar fished around for what would strengthen his attack beyond what NCR could ever handle. That big cannon was the first taste of what they could have. And there was another weakness. Fear made the Legion greedy and stupid. No matter what Monster Legate they leaned on, no matter what the soothsayers and sibyls said—they all knew that unless they got their hands on bigger weapons, meaner ones, they would lose. Again.

And again they needed her, the profligate who saw the light of Mars, to do the getting. 

Caesar wanted the Boomers and their air guns, their airplanes. Most of the tall tales his spies picked up about them checked out. They were good people, in their way. Another tribe squared off from the Wastes on purpose. Another mess of arguments and strategies to keep them safe. The Boomers, though—they were amenable to walking back into the world, or flying back, for a time, for a price. Eddy had her own price. Like Arcade said—_quid pro quo._

The Boomers wanted their bomber plane out of the water. She wanted that plane, too, and all those firearms. She promised them to Caesar, of course. Promised him they would be the difference-maker in glorious battle, sure to smash anybody who wandered into their strike zones. 

Hell, that part wasn't even a lie. They would do that. She counted on it.

He tasked her with gaining their trust from his bed. He lay there, his pale, naked body leaned against a headboard polished to a shine. His cock barely covered by a thin bedsheet, by the bent leg of his chosen slave. She didn't have on a thing. She curled up to him, her body shifting slow and lazy against his, but she hid her face in the shadow of his shoulder. His men were all around. A few watched with silent interest. Most didn't care. 

And Caesar didn't care what they thought. He wanted _her_ to see him like this. So she knew her place. He played so hard at being the big man. All it did was pinch at her. Every other nasty fucking thing aside, no wonder Joshua had wanted him dead. 

And if Joshua himself had ever been like this, pathetic and prideful, so desperate for power he'd parade his nakedness, his unwilling women, in front of a no-name courier to watch her eyes go wide? It was hard to see that ever being so. But what the fuck did it matter now? That man, whatever he was like, she'd never known, and never would. 

Her Joshua, ruined and self-righteous, she knew his dark depths. He was a whole mess of awful things she shouldn't love. If he was pathetic, if he was desperate, she would love that, too. 

She took Caesar's commands with a blank nod, a weak _vale,_ and he waved her off. 

When she neared the tent flap, she heard a slow groan from him, a low, mean laugh. "You know," he said, "some whores are good for more than two things." 

His men all laughed with him, too loud, too hard.

  
\---

  
It was clear and blue and breezy when they hit Lake Mead. She stripped at the shore, down to the Sorrows bit-covers she wore underneath her clothes, and strapped on the breathing mask snug against her glasses. Sand slush sank around her toes. Arcade stayed dry at a picnic table, laser pistol loaded and aimed for stray lurks, Rad Away pouches primed for when she hopped out again. 

The water was colder than Zion. Thicker, somehow. Murky with mushy plants and whatever spilled out of all the old cans that lined the bottom. The bomber sat heavy among them, a big, rusted can itself. Didn't look like it would ever lift to the surface, much less off the fucking ground. She could hardly see a damn thing through the murk and the bubbles, but she felt along the edges and stuck the floaties on tight. 

Sooner she left that water, the better. It wasn't nothing like swimming in the Virgin. It made her think on how she missed it. And him. And she didn't have time or heart for that. 

When she was out, Arcade hit her with the Rad Away and she hit the detonator. The lake shook, the bomber burbled up. It spilled slimy water through the window holes and see-sawed atop the lake. There it was. Eddy tried to imagine it flying through the air, like some giant cazador. Ugly and loud.

She fished through her pack for a dry shirt—her wet fingers quick-brushed the letter pouch—and used it for a towel. "Thanks for the rad stuff, doc," she said, wiping herself down fast. 

"It's a task I can accomplish with a minimum level of confidence." Arcade leaned against the picnic table and cracked his knuckles. "What's the hurry, partner?" He said it like some old-time saloon gal, in those cowboy holotapes he swore he didn't like.

"Gotta get back to the Boomers. Can't leave this thing sittin' out." Eddy pointed to the plane settled on the water. "What if it sinks again?" 

Arcade thought about it. "You make one more spectacular dive? Sell tickets this time? It won't sink. The Boomers are more than eager to lay their hands upon that monster. I'm shocked they aren't here now." 

"So we need to let 'em know. Turn around," she ordered, spinning her finger in the air. "I'm changing underpants."

He folded his arms and faced the hills back of the lake while she hopped quick into dry clothes. "You're _different_ now." 

She knew he and Follows-Chalk had the same damn curious mouth. Both talked too much. He kept poking. He knew she was keeping secrets and he was a nosy bastard. All the _I'm no different, Arcade_ and _would you fucking drop it_ didn't do a thing to put him off. But Arcade had known her nearly since she walked out of Doc Mitchell's house. Could be he saw what some of the others didn't. "How am I different? Feels like same old me to me."

"Oh," and he drew out the sound long, "there are the physical aspects, of course. A little thinner, longer hair, less sunburned. Shady out there in Zion?"

"Yeah." She tied up the belt on her loose corduroys, and pushed down deep all her thoughts of Joshua untying it. "More trees." 

"Sounds rather idyllic." He tapped his fingers in a slow rhythm on the table.

If that meant it was beautiful, and unspoiled? Yes, it was. It would stay that way. She looked back to the lake. The thick, black waves clapped against the sand, the shore sharp and white like crushed up bones. 

"Let's get a move on," she said, squeezing out her hair. She strapped on her pack and headed for the road.

Arcade's hard jog hit the ground behind her and he caught up quick. He tried so hard to make himself small, not worth noticing. She noticed him from the start. He was tall and broad, stronger than he wanted you to think, big hands and feet and he made noise when he moved. His voice was loud. He had that pretty shock of blond hair and those eyes. He stood out. When she watched the old movie holotapes, she imagined he would be one they'd pick to feature in them. A man you wanted to look at. 

She didn't figure on how much the Legion might want to look at him, too. They followed him through the camp, watching. Their ears perked up when he spoke their language. It made her work all the harder to keep them happy as she could. All the faster, to finish up before anything got bad.

"See, this is what I mean." Arcade fell into step with her. They trailed around the wide lake, circling back toward Nellis. "You were tired before you left. Now you're—" He flailed in the air for his words. "You're_ zealous._ Everything is urgent to you. Why the change?" he asked, his voice soft and guarded, like he was afraid of the answer. Like she knew something he didn't, something big and bad coming down quick. 

She stopped cold in the sand, hands gripped her pack straps tight. It was one thing to know she loved him. That was easy to say now—not out loud, fuck that, but to herself, sure. It was another to think how he might love her back. Might care what was going on in that head and heart of hers. And though she loved Arcade and Raul and everybody she'd come to know, since she hiked out of that valley there was one idea that set fire to her brain. One person whose memory rolled around in her heart like a rock in a tin can. 

Arcade stood beside her, cautious. 

"Okay," she said, and eased the pack off her shoulders. "Let's sit a minute." 

She didn't have to tell him everything. That was for her. But he deserved to know what kind of bee was in her bonnet. A little of what the heaviness was on her heart, what pushed her so hard and fast. A confession. It felt good once. Could do again.

They sat at the damp shore cross-legged and both stared out into the water. The lake's hard waves didn't move the plane one inch. 

"So I told you about this tribe war in Zion, and these New Canaanites who were in the middle of it." 

"You did." Arcade pushed his glasses up his nose.

"What I didn't tell you is that one of the New Canaanite men I met," she sighed, "was Joshua Graham." Oh, saying his name out loud hurt. She reached blind in the sand beside her and gripped a sharp rock in her fist, tight. 

It took a few seconds for the name to match its meaning. "Caesar's Legate? _That _Joshua Graham?" He looked at her, blinking. "He really is alive?"

She nodded.

"Well, that's a fairly significant detail." 

"And you gotta keep that fact under your hat," she said, pointing at him. "Out here, he's dead and that's all there is to it." 

Arcade furrowed. "I— I understand. Kind of." His eyes moved all around. His cheeks reddened. "I suppose, for example, Boone shouldn't hear that you neglected to kill one of the Legion's worst monsters when you seem to have had ample opportunity." He never scolded her, but there was that sharp anger in his voice he was so bad at hiding. 

"Nope. He should not hear that." The idea made her breath tremble. Boone wouldn't understand. She wouldn't, if she were him. 

"J— _Graham,"_ she said, "he's not Legion anymore. Hasn't been for a time. Hates them. See, the tribe we fought, they didn't go after New Canaan for fun. Caesar sent them, to massacre Graham's people." 

"Oh." It was soft but there were shades of doubt. It was that same confounding mess of inflections Joshua might put on any given word that she couldn't parse. Maybe she was the only one who couldn't do that. "Seems one can't go anyplace these days without running headlong into the Legion."

She picked at the frayed edge of her pants. "Right."

"So." Arcade propped up one knee and wrapped his hands around it, pulled it close. "What was this Graham like?" 

"Well." All the things she shouldn't say spun around in her mind. "He's tough. Educated, like you. Stubborn. Ornery. Real religious." Arcade scoffed at that. "He's, um—" She swallowed hard. "He's not so bad. Once you know him."

"Sounds like you were friendly." And Arcade sounded suspicious. "Was he truly... burned?"

She sighed. "All over." 

He stared out over the water. "How is he even alive?" he wondered aloud.

Eddy kept her eyes on the ground. She wouldn't say what she thought. That Joshua was like her—bad men couldn't kill them. That he was blessed and punished by it both. That maybe God kept him alive for her and her alone. All the answers she had for that would give her more questions, questions she could never answer.

"So, uh, he told me a few things about Caesar. Since he would know. Things about last time they fought at the Dam. And that got me thinking, you know? On how the NCR wants to do that again. Legion, too, and I thought— Well, knowing what I know, and seeing how they want to talk to me anyway, maybe we could finish it with them the way nobody else was able. And he thought so, too."

Arcade was quiet, nodding at nothing, twitching like he was working something out in his head. He did that when he chewed on a problem and couldn't put it into words. Soon enough he tapped his fingers nervously on his leg. "Are you saying this whole thing was Graham's idea?" 

"No," she said. "No, it's mine." 

He nodded faster. "Oh." Again, that _oh._ "It's just— When I met you, your entire purpose was revenge against Benny." Her stomach lurched at the name. "Which you achieved. Since then, we've done what we can against the Legion. Freed a few slaves, et cetera. But you were content to let the NCR fight it out with them. Now—" He shook his head. "Now you act as though there's nothing else in the world to do but this, and _you're_ the only one who can do it."

The lake bank bent sharp down and overhung the shoreline. You couldn't see where the water hit the sand, but you could hear it. The waves weren't soft, didn't ease and sing over smooth stones the way they did in the Virgin. They slapped the shore and ground down over the shattered rocks. Like some poor bastard clawing their way out of a hole. 

Eddy tossed the rock in her hand toward the sound. It didn't even make it past the bank, hit the sand and shrapnel with a thud. "This is the right thing to do. For everybody." 

"I don't disagree with the proposed outcome. But now you're friends with Caesar's legate? His sworn enemy? It's logical he would desire payback. And, whatever else we're doing, you're giving it to him." 

This wasn't for Joshua. But it was. Not all of it. A lot of it. It was like sucking venom from a snake bite. She took on that revenge so she could love him. So he could be free of it and love her.

_You're just like him,_ Daniel told her. 

The waves struck the sand.

"I don't know how to say this without invoking your rage, but—"

"Then don't."

Arcade took a deep, slow breath before he spoke. "But this wouldn't be the first time in our acquaintance someone duped you into doing their dirty work." 

That heat flashed up in her, through her throat, her eyes. So he thought Joshua was playing her for a fool. If that had been so, she'd have put a bullet between his eyes herself. It wasn't so. He never lied to her. She knew it in Zion—outside, they wouldn't understand. It was no dream, what they had known together in the canyon. It was truth. 

She stared Arcade down. "Joshua ain't like that." 

He looked at her, mouth hanging open, for what felt like a long while. Wary, studying her like one of his lab dishes gone sour. "I don't believe this. You—" He sputtered, his eyes shut tight. "You _can't_ have feelings for him." 

_Fuck._ The heat left quick as it came on. She said too much. She shouldn't have said anything. She shoved herself up from the soggy, broken shore, slung on her pack and stalked off hard for the path back to Nellis. The sharp rocks stuck in her palms.

_Have feelings for him._ What a stupid little clump of words. She had _feelings_ for Rex, or Mr. New Vegas. Joshua knew her down to the bone. Joshua held half her heart in his scarred hands, and he had a strong grip. 

Big steps hit the ground behind her and crept up fast. Arcade held his own pack by the straps and it swung wildly on his back. "You know, I thought I made poor choices when it came to lovers. You have truly tipped the scales in that contest."

"You don't understand." She beat down the long, sandy bank. "You don't know him."

"Neither do you. I know _you_, Eddy, you see what you want to see. If you didn't, you wouldn't have forgotten he's a monster."

A monster. There was a time she thought that and it was a long, hard road to change her mind from it. Maybe she saw the things the way she wished they'd be, could be true. But that didn't make any damn sense when it came to Joshua. She never wanted all this pain and desire, never asked to be loved or know the awful truth of what it was to love somebody else that way. Now she had it, though? Her grip was strong, too. Nobody was going to take it away. 

She stopped short and he nearly smashed into her. She turned to face him with a hard look. "I know. I know things he never told anybody else. He was like that. I can't forget it. But he ain't the only one who's done bad in this world. I have, too."

He opened his mouth, ready to fight her, but she stepped up close to his chest and fixed her eyes right up to him. "Arcade, I swear, if you don't let me say my piece, I'll gut you."

Arcade shut up and set his jaw hard. 

There was one thing he might understand. She swung her pack around to the front and unzipped it. "I'll show you this once. You're not gonna tell one soul about it." Her hands shook like a dead leaf in the wind. The leather pouch was stuck under her wet clothes. She unsnapped it, unfolded the letter, and held it out to him. 

He read through it fast, like he read everything. Turned the pages over, then read it again. His neck flushed pink. He let out a sharp breath. His eyes darted from her to the letter and back again. He didn't say a word when he handed it back to her, but he looked at her with some of that pity Daniel had for her. So they felt sorry for her, for loving somebody like him. Somebody whose wretched, wrecked body matched his soul. 

They were wrong. They didn't know how good it was.

"We've all done things we should be ashamed of." She folded the letter small and shut the pouch tight. Buried it deep. "We can all do some good things, too. If anybody'll let us." 

Arcade nodded slow. "Yes," he said, and held his arms close. He stared down at the sand, at their feet, breathing hard. His thoughts were far-off and sad and she knew he had his own troubles, the things he wouldn't speak. He was one of those types who'd fix your problem a hundred times over so he didn't have to think on his own. They were alike, too. 

Her teeth bit at her dry lip. "Look, I'm no good at saying this kind of thing. Not like him," she said. "But I love you. You know I'd do anything for you. I need you to help me now." 

And there was a lightness in saying it out loud. The love, and the asking for it. It wasn't fearsome, once it came out of her mouth. It felt right, in the air between them. 

He sighed. His face was a red mess of worry, eyes scrunched shut. "Okay," he said sharp, and opened them. "If you really are sure. About all of it. I'm with you." 

She reached for him, crooked his long arm around hers, and squeezed. 

"I knew something was different," he muttered.

She leaned against his shoulder. "You were right."

He was stiff against her, the whole of him held tight. "After we're done at Nellis, could we—" He sighed through his teeth. "Could we go to Novac? There's someone I want to see. She... She might be able to help us." 

"Sure. You bet." She didn't ask him for more.

Eddy let go of him. They walked on slow, around the long, curved bank. Beside them, the water churned against the rocky beach. 

Arade mumbled something soft, near to himself. Sounded like Legion language. She'd grown to hate the sound of it. But to hear Arcade babble things she didn't understand was a funny comfort. "What the hell are you saying now?" she asked, gently.

He laughed quiet under his breath. "It's a very old poem. That letter of yours brought it to mind." He cleared his throat for his recital. 

_"Difficilis facilis iucundus acerbus es idem:_  
_Nec possum tecum vivere nec sine te._

Difficult, easy, pleasant, bitter, you are all at once:   
And I cannot live with you or without you."

Something choked in her throat. Her heart trembled. "You saying that about me?" 

He looked at her. There was so much in his eyes she couldn't pick it apart. "In a sense." 

Her boots stopped dead in the sand. Arcade hiked on past her. 

_I can't live with you or without you._ The words hurt to hear. She didn't want them to be true. Not about Arcade. Not about Joshua. Not about her own damn self. 

A hard swing across her shoulders and the pack was in front of her. She unzipped it and felt around in the knot of wet clothes and gear for the letter. Her fingers clutched on cold, thin metal. 

Wasn't the gun, not anymore. Wasn't their necklace that marked her special and gave her passage. It was Legion money, a silver coin. Top side showed Caesar's face, back when he was young and healthy. The other, scarred and ruined, had a picture of three men. _This one here,_ a young Legionary told her in secret, _is the Burned Man. The Malpais Legate,_ he'd whispered. 

They'd tried to rub his image out, after he died, the boy said. But there were so many coins. It was impossible. 

The boy was right. The Malpais Legate was dead. The Burned Man was a story. Joshua Graham lived. 

She pitched the coin at the lake. It struck the water with a crack, and sank. It disappeared forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Arcade quotes Martial's epigram 46 from Book XII. 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading. <3


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains graphic violence.

_—Six months after—_

Summer died, and that nuclear winter everybody talked about came to be on so many dim days. The sand was cold under their boots. 

Felt like Eddy slogged more hard miles in those last months than she had her whole life. Wasn't true, couldn't be—but neither was she a patient woman. She hiked, and barely slept, and wore herself ragged. She dragged along whoever was unlucky enough to be there when she left. Arcade, usually. He grumbled, like usual. _You know, your courier ancestor, Pheidippides? He died from running around this hard. And he only made one trip. _

Things fell into their right place after that work, though. Things were set up on their targets, and all Eddy had to do was take aim. 

What Arcade told her about help was true. He had tribe. Those leftovers from the old government in California, the ones NCR wanted dead and gone. They hid in bunkers and shacks, dispersed across the Mojave. They were an army, like the Boomers, with their own stash of weapons. Even a flying machine loaded with its own big gun. 

She knew the woman in Novac he told her about, Daisy. Half-dreamed she saw her own future when she'd met her. Weathered, tough old gal, kicking around the dust thinking about better times past. Alone. But Eddy was wrong about her. Daisy had a family in Arcade, in her squad. And Eddy, she had a different future ahead of her. She would do anything to see it come to be. 

  
\---

  
Arcade set up a kind of lab at the wet bar in the cocktail lounge. Cloudy shot glasses and rusted steel spoons spread across the old, cracked serving trays. A crate of dusty detergents sat on the counter, beneath a fringe of dried datura hanging from their heads on a string. She'd wrapped the wilted flowers and thorny seedpods in an old shirt to hold them on the way back from Zion. The seeds scattered at the bottom of her pack, and she shook it empty over a bathtub to collect them. 

Arcade ground them up in a bowl. He'd been quiet, for him, since she told him about Joshua. Since he let her know what he'd been running from, or running to, because it seemed like both. Maybe it was selfish, but she never had it in her mind that anybody else had secrets she needed to know. If they had troubles, she would aid them, but they could keep their business locked up if they wanted. Somehow, though, now—there was a pull on her hard heart when she thought of those she loved keeping quiet when it hurt them. Now she had so much inside her that clawed and yearned, back and forth. 

They worked side by side. She dumped the powdered seeds into a tall glass. She peered over his shoulder and he brushed her off so he could measure out the alcohol straight. 

"We're going back one time before it all goes down," she said, casual, like it wasn't the welcome end of such a long, dark dream. "Last time, I'm going in alone." 

He cut his eyes sharp to her, and set down his ingredients, his mixers. "What happened to Virgil and Dante? You might need someone to walk with you through that hell."

He was right. She wanted someone, anyway. Him, or in some wild fantasy, Joshua. A different Joshua, still on fire with rage and revenge. One she had let loose up there on the Three Marys until he had his fill of killing White Legs. Satisfied until that urge sparked again, and he'd always find a new reason to let the fire spread. Greedy as a wild pig. 

But that wasn't the man who waited for her, safe in the Narrows or wherever he was. Safe and calm. It was up to her to protect his heart now, and she'd put up a wall of desert miles between him and anything that could hurt him. The Legion couldn't climb it. 

"I'll be fine." She gripped the rust-bloomed edge of the sink. "I know what I'm going to do. And I need you with your people at the other camp." 

He gave her a doubtful look. "I, uh, never imagined myself fighting alongside them. That was the last thing I wanted, when I was growing up. But—" He shrugged, with half a smile. "I guess my father would have been happy to see it."

And that made Eddy smile, too. To know that Arcade had been loved so much, by so many people. That hiding them away, keeping himself away so they could be safe, was his way of saying he loved them back. "You could have told me about them," she said. 

The hard wrinkle between his eyes was deep and sharp while he studied her. "You mean you wouldn't have minded hearing it? No. I couldn't tell anyone. They aren't safe. They never will be, even if they make it out of this. And maybe they don't want to." His voice broke softly then, and he swallowed hard. 

That whole tribe was old, no point being polite about it. Arcade was the youngest by a few decades. And Arcade, and Eddy, they were getting older all the time. Feeling it. She'd never imagined living this long, as it was. For so long, it nearly felt like she did it out of spite. Now she had new reasons. 

She reached up and laid a hand on his shoulder. "I'm glad you had people to care for you." 

The wrinkle deepened, and his jaw went tight. "Tell me you're not going in there to die," he said. "Not for this." 

There was such a strain on him, so much worry. She'd seen that heaviness hanging on Joshua, too, when he stared at her sometimes. She wondered if that's how she looked to other people, worn down and dragging under the weight of all the Mojave. But it wasn't how she felt anymore. Things were going right. They were coming to a close. There was a freedom in it, in how the pieces fit together like a well-oiled rifle. Like watching Joshua slip the catch into the trigger pull. _Click._

"Thought you knew me better than that." She gave him a crooked smile. "This is so I can keep on living." 

He mirrored the smile back to her. "I'll take that in writing, please." 

They went back to their preparations. Arcade corked the tincture, and set it back among the shadows behind the bar. 

"You plan to stick with them when this is done with?" she asked. "Go to Novac with Daisy?" 

He laughed, and set a glass in the sink. "I think she likes her space. Though a few more visits from the both of us, and Boone, would not be unwelcome, was the strong implication I received."

"That sounds nice." Eddy wiped her hands on her pants and sighed. "So what are you gonna do?" 

"You wouldn't mind if I..." He leaned against the bar. "If I stayed here? With you?"

No, she'd never mind that. Fact was she couldn't reconcile the two things she wanted. The family she'd created here, dusty and screwed up and wild as they were. The life with Joshua she dreamed about, that quiet sunset on all their work and pain. 

She'd known in Zion that she wanted both, and couldn't have it that way. Now, though, things had a way of clicking together. Maybe they wouldn't fit perfect like the sweet, slick catch in the rifle. Maybe they'd fit a little crooked and snaggled. And that was probably natural. 

"I got a few ideas we could work out," she told him. "So, yeah. Stay." 

He wiped his hands on a rag, and he didn't look pleased at her order. "But you won't. Stay, that is." 

Her heart leapt up and trembled. It was alive, but asleep most of the time. It only woke and beat hard when she thought about the end, about that other life. She swallowed it so she could speak. "I gotta go to him. I just have to." 

He tossed the rag into the sink, and his long arms were around her before she saw him step close. His chin knocked against the top of her head. She sighed into that musty old shirt of his. 

"Don't go forever," he said. 

  
\---

  
The Fort's gate was barred and bolted. The patched tin doors were shot through with rust and what must have been stray, hopeful bullets. The tall pikes were painted in old blood. 

"Give over your weapons," the Legionary said, bored with his role. He seemed more tired of that order than ever. So was Eddy.

She leaned in close, lay a hand on his armored shoulder. "He trusts me. Don't waste his time with this." She spoke low in his ear, felt his neck twitch. "You know he ain't got much left, without me." 

When she stepped back, his eyes were stuck on the ground. He waved his hand to the men behind him. "Go ahead." 

Whether it was the flimsy, pale attempt at womanliness she tried that did it, or that guard had a genuine fear for his Domine's life, she didn't care which. She walked through the camp and right into Caesar's tent with her carbine in her pack, stocked with fresh bullets, and Arcade with his holstered laser pistol. A trial run. Clearing the brush from the path. 

He was in bed again. This time, alone. This time, slumped in the dark, those thick curtains drawn around to block the light. A woman in tattered, too-short linen waved a woven fan at him, her eyes turned down. That bearded guard of his stood watch from the shadows.   
  
Eddy gave Arcade a stiff glance. He blinked, and dropped his bag of supplies on the rug beside the bed. He dug out a stethoscope, and the old man flinched when the metal hit his skin. 

Arcade did some poking and prodding on him. Eddy bounced her toes against the soft rug beneath her. Everybody was silent but Caesar. He let out a small groan, a choked cough. His eyes rolled like those olives on the plate. If she could believe what Joshua did, that those scales in the stars were God's, and He set the weights on what you got, what you deserved, here on the earth? Then Caesar hadn't got near what was coming to him. 

Still. She felt something bad in her heart. Pity maybe, she didn't know. You don't like to see anyone falling apart sick. Crumbling into bones and dust. She felt some of that when she saw her mama again. Hanging over that patchy junk fence, coughing into her fists. Skinny as a Mojave mongrel. Fading away. That woman had never lived at all, just scraped, and there she'd been standing, half-dead. 

You don't like to see it, no matter who. Maybe it was fucked, but killing them was easier. It wasn't even putting them out of their misery. It was putting them out of your own.

Aracde got her into a quiet corner. "It's got to be soon. I can't guarantee anything." He twisted the stethoscope in his hands. If Caesar sickened and died—yes, the Legion would weaken. They said that Monster would take over, but there'd be a wide open chink in their armor for a time. Maybe it would make it easier. But _this_ was her plan, and it was a good one. It relied upon fixing him up, being there to do it, with her own hands. 

There was another piece to things, one that felt more necessary than the rest. If Caesar died, she wouldn't get to kill him.

She'd wanted more time. Not to drag it out, but to be sure. They had one real shot. It had to be right. On the other side of things, though, the sooner it was done, the quicker she could go. See him again. Live again.

Eddy walked back to the bed and spoke to the old man plain. There was a shot she could give him that would fix it all. Easier and quicker than that robot doc sawing into him. It would stop this thing dead. 

Caesar turned his stiff neck and stared up at Arcade. Arcade nodded his confirmation.

The cure, they told him, was from the Followers' old records. He gave a weak snarl at hearing that. They got files from the Library. They sent word to the doctors there, and talked with Julie Farkas. They scrawled out phony documents and such, in case anyone checked. 

If Caesar remembered anyone in the Boneyard, he never spoke of them, or his life then. Joshua told her what he had been like, those early days. That was a false life, before he found his calling. Caesar, Edward—he'd never been interested in medicine, or anything with that stink of what he called _pitiful humanitarian urges._ He read history, philosophy, the science of minds and people. He thought he knew what drove people to fight, to die for a cause. 

There wasn't one thing he got right. What Joshua told her about the Legion towns out east, they were like NCR towns. Like anywhere she'd ever been, if not for for the slaves and the evil of it. Caesar organized people. _Delegated,_ the word was. Capable men like Joshua did the awful work, and Caesar had the big picture in his mind. 

Well. That damn time Joshua said she reminded him of the old Edward, maybe that was something like what he was thinking. Big pictures. Long plans. She had her people, and she was skilled at wrangling more into her circle. Right then they were laying her traps. Doing recon at Nelson, and the Legate's camp south of the Fort. Fixing up that airplane for tests. Oiling up their power armor. 

"Tell them what you need to finish this," Caesar croaked. He waved a heavy hand out toward where his men might have been, but there was only one. 

"We got it. We'll be quick about it." She wiped her forehead. The tent was closed up and hot. Sweat burned in her eyes. 

Caesar stared at her, cloudy and wet. "He stays." The hand pointed to Arcade. 

The sweat all went cold. Her throat choked on her breath. She muddled through all the ways to tell him _no_ without saying it outright. Without tossing Arcade into danger with the wrong word. "I need him," she settled on, "to make the shot."

Caesar kept staring. "Bring it here. He stays." 

Arcade didn't speak. He didn't even look at her. His hand drifted toward his belt, where the laser pistol was holstered at his back._ Don't do it. Don't get yourself killed._ Sometimes it felt like he could hear her thinking. Now she hoped he could. 

But his hand stopped at his thigh, and tapped, nervous and quick, against his pant leg. "You, uh—" He cleared his throat. "There's not much I can do for you right now. It would be imprudent and— and _dangerous_ to move that equipment unsupervised. And she's, uh, well—" He lowered toward the bed. "She's not the brightest scientific mind in the Mojave, shall we say." 

Leave it to Arcade. If it had been any other fucking time or place, she'd laugh. As it was, she felt like screaming. Felt like calling down whatever bombs, whatever planes were ready, if she could do that from here, and end it right then. Run between the blasts and leave the rest for God, like Joshua wanted her to do.

Caesar's bald head flopped deep into one of his pillows. "Two days." His voice was muffled, low. "Two days or I'll... I'll have you both crucified on the fucking Strip. Now go."

They went. They bowed out of that tent fast and into the open air where his throne sat. Where the other guards gathered, where slaves waited with food he couldn't even eat.

A roar ripped the air. The hill shook and growled, and the sky darkened for a long monent. Grown men jumped, eyes wide. They all turned those eyes up, then to her. "The Boomers are flying that bomber," she said. It sounded like the end of the world. She'd hardly ever heard a more joyful noise.

  
\---

  
Months back, before the night everything changed, the day dimmed into dark and Eddy sank her bare feet into the smooth rush of cool water, deep in the Narrows. They were tired, the heat made them swell, and some of her hard calluses seemed wore down into new, painful blisters. Probably her boots were worn down on the inside. She hunched over, elbows on her knees and tipped back her flask of too-warm bourbon. Let the water wash her feet for a while. Thought maybe she could stuff a fuzzy chunk of horner hide along the soles, like a cushion. It might smell, but those boots didn't smell like sweet wildflowers to begin with. No part of her did. 

She heard a slosh and a step. Then another. Some other boots on pebbles and sand. He had a gait that was easy to recognize, if you were listening for it. 

Somehow Joshua always found her. She was never sorry he did.

He was shadowed by an oak in full leaf. He stood a couple feet away, arms folded loose but sure, and stared down at her. Maybe she was growing accustomed to his face, such as it was, because she could almost read his look. Curious, cautious—like a cat you don't know sniffing up to you. It had a charm to it. 

"Pretty night," she said. 

His stare lingered, so long it itched at her, then moved to the sky. "It is." The hills were set against smoky purple. A half-moon hung low and red under a few wispy, dark clouds. The Virgin drifted along with a soft slide, and there was an animal din in the air—a mantis hiss, geckos padding across the sand. "He hath made every thing beautiful in His time." 

Eddy couldn't really argue with that. Whatever chaos slammed itself around to make up the world, whether that was what Joshua called God—right here in Zion? It came together nice.

"Do you like it here?" he asked her, without looking in her direction.   
  
Sometimes, moreso lately, since they routed the White Legs, since Joshua had got sort of peaceful—well, it didn't do her any good to try and figure out all his questions. She thought too much. She'd turn it over and upside down in her tired, gunshot head and ask, _What did he mean by that? What does he want to know?_ She felt bound to answer true, but his words kept coming back each night while she drifted off. Imagining what she might say. Then another question. 

None of it made her think on him less. Just more, and more often, and deeper. 

She wiggled her feet in the water. "Not what I'm used to. But... yeah. I'm growing fond of it." And that was a damned lie. It was like no place she'd ever been and no place she thought could exist. It was special, for reasons she could hardly put into words. 

Joshua turned to her again. "I feel God speaks loudest to us in the wild places of His creation. Like Zion. Perhaps you have heard Him." 

All she had heard was Joshua, and he read that scripture book to her like he'd written it himself. "Well, you said it was like a temple, right?" She leaned back, pushed up her glasses, and took a sharp sip. 

"I said it _is_ one." 

"Ain't that what those are for?" She held the flask out to him. A stupid tease, because he didn't drink, and she was well aware. 

What if this time he did? If he took that flask from her hand and touched her again, if he sat close enough that she could smell it on his breath, and it would be something thing to blame for whatever she did, or he did. Blame the bourbon, and not that hot ache she felt so much when he spoke to her at night, like this. Not the way she dreamed of him and wished her dreams were real. 

But he shook his head. His hands didn't move, and he didn't come any closer. 

She capped the flask and tossed it into the dirt. "You mean to stay here, permanent? You and Daniel?"

"No." He said it quick and hard. "As holy a place as it may be, it is not home. Not for us."

Her toes were going numb. She lifted her feet out of the water and set them on a big hunk of rock, still warm from the day's sun. "Where's home?" 

Joshua stepped closer, into a shaft of moonlight. His bandages lit up white, his eyes clear and hard blue. "I am not yet sure. Where is yours?"

She scoffed. "Suppose I don't have one. Never did really."

He searched her face, and that look bore into her and burned like the bourbon. "You deserve one." 

_Don't ask him what he means. Don't ask him,_ How would you know? Why would you care?

Eddy shrugged, like it meant nothing, and sat up straight. "I'm a roamer. Guess I was meant to be. Probably why I took up being a courier, you know? No need to put down a root." She'd never even thought about the why of it all. Just that it suited her, when other types of life—settling, staying, making a home—seemed like they were for other types of people. Or they used to, anyway. 

"Hard to take your boots off and set 'em somewhere when people ask you for so much," she said, brushing the dust from her feet. "You understand that, don't you?"

The bandages muffled the noise he made—a laugh, a hard sigh, she couldn't tell. "I do. Some people have much to give in this life. They have a purpose. But—" 

His arms unfolded, his dark, burned fingertips brushed his thighs. "I wonder if such people must continue that way forever. If they can fulfill that purpose and... find another." 

Eddy stared up at him. The fight at Three Marys, letting Salt-Upon-Wounds live—that night marked Joshua. She had her hand in it, she guided him and walked him through it, but it was him that was altered by it. When she met him, he was a hard bastard bent on revenge, with no patience or mercy to spare. She'd never heard him speak so uncertain and soft. Like he really had let go of that purpose, whether or not it was seen through to the end.

"How would you ever find out?" she asked.

He looked up into that low moon. "One would have to listen, and wait. Look for a sign. Perhaps things could change," he said. "Perhaps someone could change them."

  
\---

  
Eddy took the full two days she was given. 

Afternoon of the second day, she left Arcade behind, like she said she would, with his people. She had to be the one to do it. 

Boone, for once, was excited. He smiled, even, and thanked her. He took some men to Cottonwood Cove to take them out first. Then they would wait near the boats, and steady their rifles to pick those skirts off one by one. Set up a line to face whatever ran down from that dead plateau. Row the slaves over. Kill everyone else. 

Others went to Nelson, to the river line across from Willow Beach, to any camp or hole they knew the Legion haunted.

She tapped the codes into her Pip-Boy that would set off the Securitrons in the Fort bunker. It was one thing her mama had done right by her, even if it was an accident—taught her to wire up bots and repair their rusty little brains. Lucky these were in good shape. Upgraded, even. Yes Man could talk to them easy, once she said it was go time.

Arcade met his tribe outside Boulder City, and they'd head east across the passage to where the Monster lay, the other Legate. They did their jobs right, and Eddy would never once see him in the flesh. That was okay. She didn't want to. He was a horror story, a warped and tortured notion of what Joshua was, once. Whatever black scraps of his soul had been left with Legion, they'd formed into that thing. It had to be put down.

The rest of them readied the final steps. The bombs, the guns, the Boomers. But that morning, Veronica, Raul and Cass—their worry was so damn loud she could almost hear it. There was a logic problem. If she was the one inside while everything blew up, how would she make it out? Those bombs were gonna come down. There would be nowhere to hide. 

It was hard to explain. It wasn't a question of logic or sense. She'd been killed before, both spirit and body, and now she walked and worked hard as she could to see this to its end. To see out her purpose, and move on. God would protect her. Maybe He had been all along. 

There was one practical idea she had to make it work. She told Arcade, and Cass got word to Nellis, before they took off into the air. _Watch for the flames. _

She took the syringes they'd filled and her rifle. She took the scripture book. She took the letter this time, just in case. If she died, she wanted those things with her.

But she wouldn't die. She knew it. 

  
\---

  
It had been a blistering dry heat that near cooked her alive the whole day they planned to take out the White Legs. It wrung her out like an old rag. She hardly had the patience for much more. 

That night, the heat fell away, and the valley went cold. The sky was cloudless and sharp, even through her eyes. 

Daniel kept back most of the Sorrows at Half-Mouse. The rest stuck by the Dead Horses, and they followed her, and Joshua, through the starlit dark to southern ridge. 

When the passage split, Joshua spoke Dead Horses tongue and waved half the warriors one way, half the other. Then he turned to face her. 

His heavy hand fell upon the thin crook of her shoulder. His fingers gripped, then trailed up to touch her neck. He stepped close. Close as he'd been when he touched her in the Narrows, when she was sick with datura. His chest near pressed against hers. The gauze on his forehead brushed her skin when he bowed his head. 

He prayed. The dark shadow of his voice rumbled through her. 

_Father in Heaven, grant this woman Thy protection. Grant her Thy strength. She comes before Thee in earnest toil and true intention. Let her be an instrument of justice in Thy hand. Let her return to us after this night, and partake of the peace she has given us. Let us repay her that. Bless her and keep her safe. Amen. _

His eyes met hers then, so near they blurred. Black within the blue. His knee swept against her thigh. 

She thought about that, while she made her way to Fortification Hill for the last time. She spoke his prayer aloud to herself, in broken, weak pieces. She replayed it in her head, in perfect rhythm each time, a holotape of him in her mind, always. 

Where was he now, what was he doing? Waiting and listening for the sign she might send? Praying for her, like he had then, like he was in her mind, endlessly repeating?

"Go on," he'd said when he was through. "I am right behind you." And he was, always back of her as they made their way up the mountain, up to the Three Marys, each time she turned to spot him. 

He wouldn't be there now. But she felt him with her—in his book, in his letter, in his voice that never faded. 

  
\---

  
The tent was dark even in the day. Hotter, more crowded now, with men watching over Caesar, their faces unreadable in the shadows. With women mopping his brow and yanking up the quilts he kicked off. A few melting candles on his war table threw the only light. The thick air didn't move when she entered, stepping silent over the soft rugs. 

That bearded guard took notice of her and came up wearing a tired grimace. "We have already sent men to New Vegas to fetch you. Be thankful you were not any later in arriving." 

"Well, I'll say hi to 'em when I get back," she whispered, smiling. 

His eyes closed slowly. He was frustrated. Good. "Where is your doctor? Why did he leave for the south, without you?" 

"If you're watching him, don't you know?" They were, they had been the whole while, but it never seemed enough. Not if they didn't know who she met in Utah. Not if they couldn't see Arcade's trail east. From here, they couldn't even see what was happening at the Cove, at the Legate's camp. She thought they would have made it harder. She eased her pack from her shoulders. "He had family business. I can handle this part."

"Then do so. Quickly." He barked some Legion phrase to other men. One fled through the tent flaps. 

Caesar sweated in his bed. "Lucius," he called weakly. The bearded one dropped to a knee at the bedside. "Send the rest of them out. It's shameful, to see a god brought so low as this, even for a moment." 

The guard nodded, and waved the soldiers away. The women scurried behind them, heads low. She smiled at them while they filed out. If they even noticed, maybe they thought it was encouraging. It wasn't meant to be.

"You, too." Caesar coughed, and spit flew into the guard's face. He tried real hard not to wince. "Get the fuck out of here." 

The guard nodded again, and rose to his feet, his eyes dark and angry when he faced Eddy. The soldier who left first returned, yanking another woman behind him, his grip hard on her arm. She was older, with tight, iron gray curls fluffing out from the tattered cloth cap she wore. Her face was blank as her eyes. She focused on nothing. 

"This one will aid you. She has some skill at this." The guard stared at Eddy. "You may guess what could befall you, if you fail. I guarantee it will be far worse than you can imagine." 

Eddy had no fear of him. Not for one second. But he was more right than he knew. Failing now would be the end of her. 

He pushed the other soldier ahead, and they both disappeared from the dark tent. 

The only sound left was Caesar's shallow, shaky breath. 

"What's your name?" Eddy asked softly.

The woman didn't raise her eyes. "Decima."

_Please look at me. Please don't be loyal to this devil._ Eddy knelt to the ground and unzipped her pack. She fished out four thin belts sewn up from old gecko scraps. She handed them to Decima. 

"Tie him to the bedposts," she said. "Don't give him any slack." 

Decima met her stare then. Those eyes of hers weren't so blank. They were hard and sharp and there was no trust in them. She studied Eddy for a minute, then went to work on Caesar. 

His pale skin flushed red, feverish. The heat poured off him. He smelled like piss and sweat. His lips were cracked dry. 

"This is gonna hurt," Eddy warned him. 

Decima stretched out one thin arm and tied it up, then the other. Caesar whined. "It's tight."

Eddy watched her strap a bony ankle to the foot of the bed. "It needs to be."

There wasn't much left of that bad feeling she had before, that soreness in her stomach at seeing any human person in so much pain, shriveling into death. Now, she felt hot. You couldn't breathe in that tent, closed up with velvet and candles and sick. The sweat went down to her toes. She swallowed hard, and dragged a chair up to the bed, brought her pack along and sat it at her feet. 

Decima moved back, into the shadows. Caesar lay there panting. With his hands strung up like that, his head lolling to the side, he nearly looked crucified himself. 

"You've been a loyal servant to us," he whispered. "That idiot sybil told me to kill you. What the fuck does she know? You, the wasteland whore turned savior." He tried to laugh, but it came out choked. "He would have hated that the most. He would have slit your throat." 

His words stopped her hands from digging through her pack. "Who?" she asked, gentle and dumb as a brahmin. Though she knew exactly who he meant. 

He ignored her. "Oh, but he wanted _me_ to die. I knew." He coughed wetly. "He was weak. Too weak to take me out. Just another fucking tribal I conquered. Killed." 

His eyes were far off, years back, that place Joshua had gone when he spoke on the Legion—but Caesar was still in it. By all accounting, he _was_ it. Maybe the Legion was dead. Maybe Caesar had killed it when he tried to kill Joshua. These were the last gasps in the thick air, hard to swallow. The body was dying, but no one had accepted the truth.

She lifted the filled syringe from her pack and set it in her lap.

Caesar went on babbling. "But he was smart. He used that sky god shit to fuck with people's minds. To scare them, make them do what he wanted. We'd laugh about it." He groaned against the straps, like he forgot they were there. Like he forgot any of it was there, and he was spilling his guts to someone who wanted to hear him. 

"He didn't believe in it," he said. "He saw the utility in religion. To control people. That's all it's for." 

He tried to gesture to the curtains, to the gold plates with his face that hung upon the tent walls. "That's what all this is for. That's why I did it. He should have understood that." 

_He didn't believe in it._ Eddy's blood flashed hot. So hot it burned right through her skin, and her face flamed. 

Edward, or Caesar, who the fuck ever—he must have never really known Joshua. Arcade hadn't laid eyes on him. Daniel thought he could see what was in Joshua's heart. No one knew. That was how they could get him so wrong. To decide he was evil. To picture him one false step from depravity even now. To say that he would _lie_ to her about the depth of his love, about the weight of sin that near crushed his soul. 

He had never lied to her. She was the only one in this world who knew him. They would all trap him, or kill him, for who he was. What he'd been. She wouldn't. She would ease open the trap and set him free, the way he'd done for her, by knowing her, by loving her. She would put out the fire he started by setting her own. 

A wildfire clears the land. It burns the dead. It makes a new path.

Caesar turned and saw her again, real, beside him. His face changed, closed up. "Forget all that I said. Now," he panted, breath labored, "do this thing. And you will be rewarded.”

It wasn't even anger she felt, because she was so calm. It was like something else took over her hands and moved them. Picked up the syringe. Lined up the needle along his sweat-soaked arm, and plunged it deep. 

Caesar whimpered. His body shuddered.

She looked to the shadows. Decima stood sill, watching. 

"Yes," Eddy said, while she eased the needle out of him. "Happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us." 

His eyes went wide and white. Wet, and trembling. He knew the words. "What?" he whispered through the spasms.

Eddy tossed the syringe into the dark. "You were talkin' about Joshua, right? He taught me that line, too." 

The muscles in his throat went hard. It wasn't fear that shook him. It was rage. But he couldn't do a thing about it. "He sent you?" Drool crooked down his chin.

She smiled at him. "I sent myself. I came to end you, and your Legion. I wouldn't mind doing it a hundred times." She leaned back in the chair. "You might've convinced yourself it would take that many. That you're unkillable. Joshua and me are like that. For you, it'll only take once."

All he could do was stare at her. Even if his limbs had been free to move, they'd probably lost feeling already. Turning cold, and blue.

"You wanna hear another one he taught me?" She leaned down, fished out her carbine, a ragged box of bullets, and a full bottle of whiskey. The whiskey fell over at her feet.

"I will take vengeance," she said, "and I will not meet thee as a man."

Caesar managed a scared, strangled laugh when he saw the rifle. "What are you going to do to me? My men—"

"Oh, I already done it." She stuffed a bullet into the breech. The brass was warm on her fingers. "That shot I gave you, it's bad poison. Datura, cazador, Abraxo cleaner. It'll take a few minutes, but you're dead already."

His eyes blinked, slow. His lungs rattled and scratched.

"And that ain't all," she said, when the rifle was fully loaded. She sat forward, elbows on her knees. "I'm gonna sit here and watch you die. Then some other folks are gonna come along and bomb your body to pieces. Now, what would you call that? Historical inevitability or something?" She shrugged. "It's just fact." 

She uncorked the whiskey and took a long drink to calm her shaking. It wasn't pretty, watching someone die like that. It was like Oak Creek. It was like Benny, like home that was never home. She'd killed so many, for some bad reasons. Sometimes it did feel like revenge. Like they'd hurt her, and her alone, and she needed to pay it back to keep living. To be the one who lived. 

But revenge, vengeance, those words couldn't wrap around the whole of what it was. These, the ones who set that fire spreading wild around her, they were justified. She hurt people who hurt people. Maybe that was her purpose. 

Soon enough, his breath grew quiet. Soon enough, he didn't move at all. 

_Ignominious._ The word came to her. Arcade had said it, said it would probably fit the end they planned for Caesar. He was right.

Decima came forward, to the other side of the bed. She looked from the body, to Eddy, and back again. "Is he really dead?"

Eddy flipped the safety on her carbine. "Yeah. Do you care?"

After a long pause, after she stared at the dead man and the tight straps she'd wound around him, Decima said, "Yes." There was nearly a smile on her face. "I longed for the day." 

That was what Eddy wanted to hear. She zipped her pack, slung it on, and marched around the bed. "If you want out of here? Gather up your people now. Wait for the fire to start. Hell's gonna break loose in this camp. You take them and run down to the shore."

Decima gave her a hard look, cautious. She had no trust, and Eddy had done one decent thing. Not enough to earn it. "You came here to free us?"

"No." It was fair to tell her the truth. "I came to kill. Don't get in my way."

The woman said nothing. She turned and ducked under the back flap of the tent, into the noise of the camp. 

Eddy took a deep breath. She checked the time on her Pip-Boy. The others should have already finished. They were waiting on her. She turned the stiff dial and tapped in the go codes. After a second, the earth shuddered from a distant boom.

Light flew up and into the room. The tent flap opened and shut quick. It was the bearded guard. "Have you finished? There's something—"

She raised her rifle and took one clear shot before he ever saw it. He slumped in a bloody heap on the ground. 

Everyone else would hear it. Whichever of them weren't checking out the bunker, where the Securitrons should be coming out—they'd head for her. 

She reached for the whiskey and flung it at the tent walls, the heavy curtains, the bed. She took a candle from the table and set the flame to the tail of a tent flap. It went up quick. She lit the other corner. Fire climbed the walls in seconds and spread to the roof. The tent filled with smoke, suffocated with heat. She ran out, into the open before the whole thing took her down with it. 

There was already a wild mess outside the camp. You could hear it from the little atrium where they kept that stupid throne. There was shouting and laser fire. There was a distant metal rumble, and another. Loud buzzing, like a swarm of cazadors. 

The soldiers saw her walk out of the flames. They saw her rifle, saw her covered in blood. Some of the men who'd left the tent hung around here—interested to see if he died, she guessed, and now afraid of what was coming down around them. They wanted to save themselves at the expense of everyone else. They thought they could take one woman out easy. They were wrong. 

One came at her with a ripper blade that grazed her arm. The sting annoyed her more than it hurt. She snapped back and shot him in the neck. His blood spewed and muddied the ground. She hit another in the far corner, before he could get near. The flames reached the other tent walls and spread. The big gold plate with Caesar's face swung, hanging from a charred, blazing string until the string snapped, and it dropped into the dirt with a dull clang.

From nowhere, a wrenching, sharp pain, and she was blind. A fist struck her face. When she opened her eyes, half the world was shattered. One lens of her glasses smashed and broken. Blood dripped in her eye, and she couldn't breathe. The red curtain beside her swept up in fire, the heat swirling through the air. 

Then—her feet left the ground, and the air left her lungs. Slammed to the ground, the pack beneath her no kind of cushion. Her body felt cracked in half, then worse, when someone jumped on top of her. He twisted and wrestled her, she kicked wildly, and he shoved her into the flaming curtain. 

Everything slowed in the pain. The fire seared her shoulder, her neck. She smelled her own skin cooking. But there was a lull in her senses, a darkening, like her brain was in some other body. She saw her real body on the ground, clear as a picture, with this man on top of her. He held her down by the chest. That body, the pain was everything. It was so bright and fierce it was unreal. 

Her brain, in the other body, thought of Joshua. It wasn't so ridiculous that he'd come to mind then. She thought of how he lived through this hell. She thought of what kept him surviving while he burned, and after. _It was love,_ he said. She knew what that was now. That's what she was fighting for. 

Eddy swung her rifle and cracked the fucker in the head with the butt. Then again. His grip loosed, and she got a hard knee in his gut. He pitched back enough for her to roll away, to tamp out the flames on her skin. Putting them out was near as awful as the burn, until it numbed into nothing. The man slumped on the ground beside her, tried to move his limbs to get up. 

She wedged the muzzle into his cheek and squeezed that trigger. 

His blood soaked her. It spattered into the flames and sizzled. 

She scrambled to her feet and ran out into the camp. It was chaos and fire. Nothing was left of the Legion here. Nothing could be rebuilt. 

There were laser shots and screams. Other tents were aflame, or smashed. The arena was flattened, a smoking ruin. Up on the high edge of the plateau, that big gun Caesar had counted on was a black husk. Securitrons wheeled through the dust, hardly a scratch on them. 

There were two awful noises in the air. One was a long whine, from the bomber circling the camp. It dropped missiles and fired from above. Bodies and dirt flew into the air, wherever they shot. 

The other sound was a constant thump and whir, like a manic heartbeat. Eddy felt it before she heard it. She feared it might be her own heart failing. But then it showed in the sky. The vertibird coasted in, and hovered over the plateau. It dropped to a soft landing on a what might have been a tent, now a patch of ash. 

A suit of power armor leaned out its doorway. It popped its helmet off. Arcade, his glasses fogged, face sweaty. He gestured and yelled for her. She ran to it best she could, and ducked under the spinning blades. 

Daisy had the helm, and she knew what she was doing. Eddy had never been off the ground like that, and never wanted to be. Her stomach spun and lurched when the thing took up in the air again. 

Somehow, it was the most scared she'd been all day. She had to laugh. 

The vertibird swung around the camp before it headed northwest. Eddy gripped whatever she could find real tight, and steeled herself to look down. 

Fortification Hill was gone. Nothing but debris and defeat. Burned, and dead. She wondered if he knew it, somehow.

_Well, Joshua. I saw to it._

Though he was nowhere near, she felt his answer. _I had every faith in you._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oops, I did it again—there will be one more chapter! This is not the end! Last one, I promise. Very soon.
> 
> Thanks for reading, everyone. It has been a journey. I hope you enjoy what's left to come. <3


	18. Chapter 18

_—Eight months after—_

  
Eddy wrote a letter soon as she could put pen to paper. 

_Caesar is dead. The Legion in the west is dead. _

_I'm sending this with some caravaners to the Sorrows in Zion. If you've already split, I hope they pass it on to wherever you've gone. _

_Tell me where you are. I'll find you._

And she waited. 

  
\---

  
Meantime, there was a mess to clean up. It kept her busy. 

Another bunch sent by Happy Trails wanted to reach past Zion and into Utah. Eddy encouraged them, and gave them her maps. Said they'd find a peaceable place and people this time. They took her letter and some supplies she thought the Sorrows could use: wire and rope, a few knives. She wished them luck. Their trip would be easier. They might even swing through Arizona, since there'd been not a hair glimpsed of Legion anything west of Flagstaff for two months. It might stay that way for a while. 

She and Cass, but mostly Cass, worked up a deal with the caravans on their regular routes in Legion territory. They trucked out a few extra men and women, and a whole lot of munitions. They settled in pockets of sand and nothing along the way. New NCR outposts, hiding in plain sight. 

That was the contract they shook on, her and Oliver, to keep his army pushing east, and keep their hold on the Mojave loose. She'd saved them a war. The brass took the deal with a smile, though the teeth might've been clenched. There was some disappointment in these parts. Some of them had been itching for a battle, and she blew the wind right out of their skirts. But it was better that way. No more war. At least not the big kind. Maybe Daniel would be happy to hear it, if he ever did. 

Boone went east to one of the outposts. He wasn't tired of killing Legionaries yet. They begged him to take a new commission, but he never would, even though he kept wearing that beret. They wanted to give him medals and titles and whatnot for his part in it. The Battle for the Colorado, people started calling it. Fuckin' ridiculous. 

There were rumors of all stripes about what happened on that plateau. Some said it was a a scuttle for power, the Legate's loyal men versus Caesar's, and they destroyed themselves. Some said only the Brotherhood had weapons like the ones that smashed the Fort, and they feared what might come next from those bunkers in the sand. 

Some said the Burned Man really had come back to the Mojave alive, and set fire to Caesar in his own bed, while the rest of the Legion fell. 

But she figured Decima made it across the river safe, because some told the tale true, and it was known who had done the deed. The stories were the same in towns across the Mojave, little things you couldn't have known if you weren't there. Two people walked out of that tent alive, and Eddy hadn't said much.

She thought about searching for Decima. Giving her a kind of thanks or payment for her aid. Something stopped her. She knew what it was like to walk away from a life that hurt you. No thanks would be worth remembering what never left your mind anyway. And Eddy couldn't give favors or opportunities she had no right to. She was no better than anybody else. Let Decima make her own life, now she had the freedom to do it.

For all his worrying, Arcade's tribe made it out safe, too. They went their separate ways again, left a trail of Mojave dust behind them in every direction. Daisy wanted to keep up, and invited them for a supper in Novac, as long as someone else did the cooking. 

Eddy got a few new scars. A cut where the glasses smashed, an ugly black eye, too many scrapes to count. And the burn. Her neck and shoulder stung sore for weeks. It itched like crazy at the edges of the gauze. It hurt to run her fingers over the bandages, but she did it anyway, because she missed the feeling so damn much. To have that texture under her fingertips again. 

When it came off, her neck was shiny and red on one side, from her ear down to that numb rifle kick bruise. It was a far-off echo of what his skin was like. It didn't make her any more like him. Still. She'd slide down her shirt collar and stare at it in a cracked mirror. 

She thought of him, but that was nothing new. She never stopped.

She got a lot of letters and notes and books and contracts via courier and caravan and various manner of folk. Most were from strangers, and most were strange. She'd sift through the pile of them she kept on a craps table at the 38 and search for anything personal. For weeks there was nothing, until she came across a funny note. It wasn't the one she waited on, but it was welcome all the same. 

Follows-Chalk sent word to her from New Reno. Of all the fuck-ridden places he could end up. Paid somebody to scrawl the note, he said. He was learning about caps. She hoped it wasn't the hard way. 

Somehow he'd walked right around Vegas and on through the snow. He was safe, though, and headed back east. Wanted to see Vegas proper, with the lights and people dancing. Wanted to see the big Red Rocks and the stripey-leg burros. Maybe take a climb with her early one morning up into the hills. The notion clutched at her heart, and she left word with anybody who'd listen that if she wasn't there to greet him, Follows-Chalk could have anything he asked for.

New Reno, he said, was sparkly, but he missed the colors from home. Well, the Red Rocks might suffice for a fine substitution. And if he thought New Reno was anything more than a glittery trash heap, New Vegas just might impress him. 

But Eddy? She got so sick of the place. Felt cold and dark all the time, even in the sun. She thought about Zion. She thought about that patch of rocks down south with Joshua's name.

Veronica and Raul went to survey it for her. See where they could build something new. She had to stay in Vegas until she heard from him. However long it took. 

Each day hurt. It got so long she thought about heading back to Utah herself. If she didn't hear back the next month, she'd go. At least they'd have an answer for her there, a path he might have taken she could follow. 

The 38 was too quiet. Eddy needed the noise and nonsense outside to fill her mind up, so it wouldn't spin on her memories of him, on her loneliness. Like a roulette ball without a slot to hide in. She'd walk the Strip until she couldn't keep her eyes open anymore. Sometimes she'd pass out on the street, slumped up against the broken concrete. The hero of the Battle for the Colorado, the Slayer of Caesar, drooling in the dirt while drunks and gamblers tripped over her boots. 

Arcade found her one afternoon, perched on the edge of a fountain that stunk distinctly of beer piss and old smokes. Two dancers in skimpy leather shimmied and twisted against each other on the sidewalk. They looked as tired as she felt, but the tourists clapped and hollered. 

"How you doing?" he asked, in a fake-bright voice that made it obvious she wasn't doing good. That he'd seen dead people more lively than her. He sat beside her on the fountain ledge.

"You really wanna know?" She yanked her straw cowboy hat down lower against the late sun that crept between the casinos. 

"It's why I asked." 

She sighed. "Half of me's numb and half of me's nervous. Feels like I'm always waiting for something. Leaving someplace because what's on my mind is another one. My mind can't slow down. My body won't let me. I want to know what it's like to stay put for a while." She rubbed at the pain under her eyes with two grimy fingers. "Seems like I had that for a second out in Utah. But I knew it couldn't last there." 

Arcade nodded slow. "That's certainly a more thorough answer than I expected. I was prepared to needle you for a good long while. Irritate you into introspection." He poked her in the arm with one long finger. "Don't take my job from me."

"Yeah, well." Eddy kicked at a loose brick in the fountain base. "I've had a lot of time to think. You doing ok? You need anything?"

"Are we talking strictly real possibilities, or can my wildest dreams come true?" 

"Anything you want, you got it." And she meant it. He'd been there for her through the hardest times. Maybe he didn't always approve of what she was after. So what? It was like Daisy said. He had her six, and she had his. 

"Then I'll have a list of demands on your desk by morning." He gave her his best attempt at a smile. "Honestly, I'm taking my own time to think. Coasting along, hiding out—it feels wrong now. We made a lot of things happen that were necessary, and I'm... proud of that. It's an unfamiliar sensation. So. This has given me time to ponder what I could do next. Because I'd like to do something." He crossed his arms. "And I'll come up with an answer eventually."

"You will," she said. "A good one."

A sharp sunset cast a glow on the Strip. It would be pretty, maybe, if you took your glasses off to blur the details. Arcade squinted into the sun. It flamed his hair orange, like neon. "When you go," he said, running a hand through that bright hair, "will you let me know where?"

Eddy shook her head. "You know I can't. You know why. I trust you, but—"

"No, I get it." He waved a hand at her. "But... be careful."

It would be a lie to promise that. So she kept quiet.

"I get it now. All of it." His glasses glared in the light. "Because I saw what you were like after the Tops. After you hunted down Benny." The name hardly made her flinch now. Like the gun. Seemed so long ago. "You'd done what you set out to do, and then your _raison d'etre_ disappeared."

"My what?" 

"Your reason for getting up in the morning. Your purpose." 

She sneered sidelong at him. "You could just say that."

"The point is," he said, "regardless of my opinions, and I do have several that might set you to violence no matter how I express them—" He turned to her with a sigh. "You need your purpose. You have to go to it, wherever it is. Whoever it is."

It was nothing she didn't already know was true. But to hear Arcade speak it gave her some peace. It settled a stirring behind her ribs that had not let up since the Fort went down. She didn't need his approval, or anybody's. A confirmation, though, of the facts. That was welcome. 

Eddy edged closer to him on the dusty fountain ledge. "Thanks," she whispered, her throat tight. 

The sun sank fast behind the buildings, and left a haze of dull clouds over the city. The casino lights would block out the stars, dim the moon. Every night was the same, like the days.

On one of those endless days, a Mojave Express runner brought her a letter right there on the Strip. Somehow before he even handed it to her, she knew what it was. Felt the spark in her stomach. That fire, aflame again. The lights and tinny music and booze puke and concrete slid away into the gray, and all she could see was the letter. She nearly crushed it in her hands. 

It was that smooth curve of his handwriting she could trace with her finger. It was short and to the point and unsigned. It was a brief description, and directions, coordinates. It pointed the only way she wanted to go.

  
\---

  
His coordinates weren't in Zion. They fell south and west, in that podunk nowhere Eddy ran straight through when she'd left him. She ran right back to it. 

For the first time in months, the sunlight warmed her skin. 

The run landed her south of the 15, at the edge of Nevada territory. An old farmhouse perched back a ways in flat, dry field. 

The walls were standing and steady, the patchy roof was whole. A slat porch edged the whole of the front, with scuffed pillars and a few railposts leaning out like a kid's loose teeth. In the sideyard, a dirt patch and planters fresh tilled. Barrel cactus dotted the sand and grass around the house. Even a few fuzzy chollas, and Joshua trees. There weren't any chickens around, but a creek ran down parallel to the place, and meandered on in the dust. It sang and laughed. 

After the porch, the land ran wide and empty far as her eyes could see. The house, it looked east. The sun would come up right in its face. 

Two soft knocks sounded behind her. Quick, like a heartbeat. Boots on the wood porch. Her own heart dropped, and she turned around. 

There he was. Leaned against a porch pillar, broad arms folded wide like always. He had on a dusty black shirt, and those old torn jeans. What he didn't have on was the flak jacket. No pockets for those bullets. No gun to be seen. And no bandages to cover his face. He brought her here to see him true again, to see his scars and his sorrows. To see the plain adoration and relief in his face that no scar could keep from showing.

He stared, silent, then his shoulders fell with a long sigh. "Welcome home, Eddy."

Home. There he was. 

"Joshua." His name was a shudder, a cry held back. She slung off her pack and winced at the hurt. Something moved her boots up the steps and close to him. She couldn't see. The porch was a blur past her tears. 

His rough hand stroked her cheek, dusty and wet. Those thick, callused fingers threaded into her hair. His grip was so urgent, he was shaking, but the pain of it was sweet for her. "I thank my God upon every remembrance of you. And now I am able to touch you again. You feel..." The fingers let loose her hair. One hand swept down her back, and the other brushed aside the hair on her shoulder. 

That was the scar side. Healed, but red and sore. It looked worse than it felt, and she wasn't surprised to see his expression grow hard. "What happened to you?"

Eddy's own hand wrapped slow around his wrist. "It's nothin'." She didn't want to talk about what happened. Not for her own sake. For his. 

His eyes snapped up to hers. "Are you in pain?"

She shook her head and swallowed another sob. 

He bent toward her neck, his breath stinging her skin. The heat of him was so strong it felt like his lips touching, kissing her, but it was a shadow. When he pulled back, the worry faded into that breathless relief she'd seen in him. The one she felt just as strong. "I was going to say there wasn't a scratch on you." His fingers swept over her lip. "But that's quite a scratch."

She placed a wet kiss to his thumb. Tasted the dusty salt of his skin again and shivered. "I'm fine."

"I know. Nothing can hurt you for long."

He always thought so high of her. That thought wasn't any kind of truth. How long had his nearness hurt her, and then his absence? How long had the bad she'd done hurt her, shamed her and poisoned her? The bad everyone had done—even Joshua. The things she kept trying to fix, but there was always more bad. Most times you had to do bad to be good. She was scarred from that, and not on her outsides. 

Wasn't until she came to love him that the hurt began to fade, and she had something good of her own, that made her stronger. Not a tight fist clutched on old fears anymore. Not an empty bullet waiting for gunpowder. 

Joshua didn't teach it to her from his scripture book, but somehow she learned—the good was here because of the bad. There was no undoing it. There was only moving ahead, and setting more weight on the side of the scale that meant something to you. 

"I don't know about that," she said, searching his eyes. Clear and open and blue as the day. "But you're a sight."

She held him tight and crushed into his body, hard as she could. She breathed into his shirt and felt his chest rise against hers. He gave a shaky sigh, near in pain. Then his hold on her squeezed and he lifted her to her toes. 

She took his scarred cheeks in her hands. She whispered, "I love—" But he cut her off with a kiss. 

It was slow and sweet and hungry. It was wet with her tears and hot from his sighs. 

There was fear in his kiss, a different kind of need, like it was the last time he'd ever do it. Maybe he'd been afraid it would never happen, and he wouldn't take one soft bite of her lip, one taste of her tongue, for granted anymore. Maybe it was that _she_ felt all those fears. 

But this was the first, again, of a number that would never matter, because it was too fucking high to count. 

They broke for a breath, and she buried her head in his chest. Her eyes shut. This was what she'd wanted. The house was a dream. If he'd pointed her to an old bathtub in Ivanpah Lake she would have moved there. Happy to do it, if she could hold him like this for a few hundred years. 

"You found this place?" she mumbled into his shirt. 

He stroked her hair and hummed. The sound echoed in her bones. "Once you left, I felt..." His arms hardened around her, his chest tensed. "I couldn't stay. And I could not go north with Daniel. I nearly walked all the way to New Vegas to follow you."

That same fear stirred in her again. She eased back to look at him. His eyes were yearning and desperate. They said, _For you, I would have walked straight into that hell once more. I would set the world on fire if it meant getting back to you._

Which was everything she wanted to keep him safe from. Keep them both safe.

"You—" She shook her head. "What if somebody saw you?"

His stare held. She didn't have to ask. He would have done whatever he must, to keep himself alive for her. It's what she would have done. But he wouldn't tell her that. "I kept off the main roads. Traveled by night," he said. "Until I came upon this place. I heard the water. It called to me."

Joshua stared out at the open plain and she followed his gaze. The land met the sky so far away in a heated blur. "Well, I can see why. It's perfect."

"It is now." He stroked her back, his warm hand heavy. "It's what we wanted."

Those tears she never seemed to have much use for, now they wouldn't stop. "I wasn't—" She sniffed and wiped her face on his shirt. "I wasn't so sure you wanted this, too."

"Eddy." He let go his hold on her, tipped up her chin, brushed her hair behind her ears. His neck tensed with a hard swallow, a breath. "I am ashamed of my doubts. That we would need the security of a tribe. Mine, or yours. But my faith in you led me here. This is all we need.

"God made this for us." His hard thumb rubbed into her good shoulder. "And I did a little work, as well." 

Despite it all, he made her laugh, and she felt lighter for it. "You did good."

He gave her that stiff smile she missed so fiercely. "Give me a blessing. For thou hast given me a south land, give me also springs of water. This is still the Virgin River, you know," he said, nodding toward the creek. "We could follow it back to Zion, if we wanted."

Her hands wrapped around the worn leather belt at his back. The Virgin stayed with them. She wondered once where it led, what it carried along and what it left behind. It was the day he came to her in the Narrows, the first day she knew she needed him. When she saw him as a man, with his faults and sins, and he saw hers. He touched her, and she was set aflame there in the water. 

Now she had the answer. The river carried them both here. 

She took a deep breath, and let go. Dragged her pack up the porch steps and unzipped it. She didn't have to fish too deep to find what she was looking for. The pebbled leather, worn like his belt, found her hand. 

She held it out to him. "I think this belongs to you."

Joshua took the scripture book from her, carefully, with both hands. "Thank you," he said softly. There was a lot in his _thank you._ It felt like he wasn't saying it to her.

He held the book close. "So." He studied her, his eyes fell on her new scars, on her burned neck. "What did you do?"

Eddy traced her fingers light across the red scars in his own cheek. "It's done. You don't need to know."

One of his hands took hers and gripped tight. Too tight, to hold on to what had set him free. His jaw was set hard, the one mangled, bent nostril twitched. It was an end to things for him. More final, even, than the Grand Canyon. Than that night on the Three Marys. And for her, moreso than any other time she took a shot and ran, to put the pain behind her like so many dusty miles.

It wasn't a beginning. It was continuing what began between them, before they ever set eyes upon each other. Dark roads split parallel, until they met in the valley. Then there was one path.

There were questions in his stare, ones he wouldn't speak aloud. He blinked them away. "All in a day's labor serving the Good Lord, then?" He smiled again. That was a blessing.

Her heart trembled. She stroked the feather tufts of hair above his ear. "Maybe so," she whispered. 

They shared a long look. They understood each other. Past was past. There was a new life ahead of them.

Joshua took her wrist in his hand and brought her fingers to his thin, scarred lips. He kissed them softly, his eyes fluttered shut. Then he bent over with a grunt, and shouldered her pack. "Go on." He gestured to the open door. "I'm right behind you."

Eddy stepped through the doorway. The cool, open room invited her inside. There was a peaceful quiet there in its shade, a comfort in the way the dim enveloped her. Joshua followed. He shut the door behind him. 

The rest of the world went on as it was, without them, for a time. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From Philippians 1:  
_I thank my God upon every remembrance of you.  
Always in every prayer of mine for you all making request with joy...._
> 
> From Joshua 15:  
_And she lighted off her ass; and Caleb said unto her, What wouldest thou_  
_Who answered, Give me a blessing; for thou hast given me a south land; give me also springs of water._
> 
> \---
> 
> And that, for now, is all.
> 
> Thank you for reading. I have truly loved writing this story. It's helped me to grow as a writer and, frankly, as a person. Though I suppose that never stops, does it, if we're lucky? I do feel lucky. Times are very dark and hard, for all of us. This has been a little refuge for me. I like thinking of Joshua and Eddy, happy in this house together, growing corn and reading, watching storms roll in over the desert plain. It's a thought I will come back to again, I'm sure.
> 
> Thank you for your comments and kudos. Each one is a gift. I really appreciate you all so much. Stay safe, well, happy, and fulfilled, please. ♥
> 
> Thanks also to Josh Sawyer for all the inspiration, and biblegateway.com for helping this heathen with the Good Book.


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